About JMA

JMA started as an afterschool program in Fremont, California and quickly grew into an enrichment program for student in homeless shelters, low-income housing complexes, and elementary schools in California’s Bay Area. Since 2016, we have been working hard to expand our curriculum across the United States and the world. Currently, our curriculum is accessible to students in fifteen countries including the United Kingdom, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Ghana.

Our teaching model centers around conceptual understanding through analogies and application over rote memorization. Not only does this better help students understand the concepts we teach, it also enables them to use the knowledge that they have learned for real-life experiences such as science fairs and projects or internships. We are proud to say that our volunteer-led model has been widely successful in every location that has adopted it and has enabled our curriculum to reach rural regions in countries which experience obstacles to higher education and learning, including a lack of internet access and language barriers. 

Currently, JMA continues to teach students in the United States using our original curriculum. We have also created new programs, one of which pairs students from resource-scarce regions in Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Botswana with mentors from Ivy League universiites, free of cost. Mentors help their mentees navigate the SAT, academic exams, college applications to the United States, our new Biotechnology in Medicine curriculum, and acquiring research positions and experience.  We are also working with Voices on the Mount, a nonprofit organization based in Ghana run by students for students, on a new initiative called Scientists of Tomorrow to provide biotechnology-based lessons to students across twelve countries. We intend to connect these students to university professors for research internships and help spread the knowledge they have gained throughout their communities.