The Venkat Trust is buzzing and the school children and the university students are delighted to be back at their schools and colleges after the long pandemic. Read all about it here.

VMT Trustee John Whelan and Alex Smallman, our honorary fundraiser, are braving the elements, as well as aches and pains to run the Brighton Half Marathon, this Sunday, 27 February, with 12 members of Ubermummies, Alex’s friendship and fitness club. Their target is £10,000 to buy one of the new classrooms being built at our […]

4 February 2022 was another big milestone in the story of the Venkat Trust with the laying of the foundation stone for the new Kovalam Higher Secondary School. The ceremony was attended by important government officials the District Collector, Chief Educational Officer and District Educational Officer, who joined JR, the Headmaster, pupils and the VMT […]

NEW DONATIONS PORTAL: We’ve set up a new online donation facility with Charities Aid Foundation Bank to replace Virgin Money Giving which has now closed. Here’s the direct link to our CAF page

We’ve launched our appeal to raise funds for the second phase of the VMT Higher Secondary School. After a long and bleak time during Covid, our children and young people are at last back at their schools and colleges, bringing much missed chatter and laughter after the many months of closed doors and depressing silence. […]

Our beautiful High School is now a fully fledged Higher Secondary School and the pupils are flooding in. Read all about this, the latest Covid update from Kovalam and how the students are settling into the University Club in the July Newsletter.

About one in ten of Kovalam’s adult population now has Covid and there are no hospital beds for them, oxygen supplies are very low and there’s no vaccine. We’ve set up the Venkat Trust Covid Emergency Programme to help Kovalam through the pandemic. At last – thankfully – Tamil Nadu is in total lockdown but […]

Our November newsletter has news on how Kovalam is coping with Covid19 and highlights from the Zoom Virtual Curry Lunch.

Here’s our new video. We hope you enjoy it and please pass it on to any friends and others who might be interested in becoming a supporter.

Our May newsletter has news from Lockdown Kovalam, a new film about our work and the first ever girls’ cricket team in a Tamil Nadu Government High School.

The latest news from Kovalam, including a report of the Big 80th Birthday Bash, the BEM and Kather Mytheen’s story, “What the Venkat Trust means to me”. Download it here.

We are delighted to announce that VMT founder Sylvia Holder has received a British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours 2019 “for services to Education in Kovalam India”. Read the report here.

Amazon shoppers, VMT will receive 0.5% of the net purchase price (excluding VAT, returns and shipping fees) if you sign in through smile.amazon.co.uk and nominate the Venkatraman Memorial Trust as your chosen charity.

Our two boy snooker stars, Sridhar 15, and Shaunalla, 18, had never heard of snooker, let alone picked up a cue, until the snooker table kindly given to us by supporter Peter Bainbridge, arrived at the high school. Since then they have excelled themselves at the game and both have beaten formidable competition at national […]

Sylvia tells the story of the day she met Venkat on the beach in Kovalam in the Sunday Telegraph Stella Magazine. The rest, as they say, is history.

To stand on a rostrum and deliver a speech in your mother tongue is nerve wracking enough, to do so in the language of a country you’ve never visited before must be totally daunting. But JR pulled it off with huge aplomb, much to the delight of the VMT supporters gathered together for our biannual […]

When UK trustees Sylvia, Nick and Lindsay were in Kovalam in January, they were delighted to meet Linda and Staveley Ferguson who were visiting Chennai. Linda and Staveley sponsor Kishore and they made a special detour to Kovalam to meet him and his family. Here they are with Kishore, his mother, sister and grandmother, outside […]

Snooker is now taught at the VMT High School thanks to a UK supporter’s generous gift of a beautiful three-quarter size snooker table. The pupils are hooked already and Chennai’s No 1 snooker player will be giving weekly lessons from now on. Snooker’s growing fast in India and we’re now on the lookout for a […]

The Venkat Trust is hosting an event,”Celebrating Humanity”, in Chennai on Saturday 30 January. It is being organised by VMT’s India trustees Janakiraman, Jude Sax and Ali to thank the individuals, charities, businesses and corporations that supported VMT’s relief work in Kovalam and Chennai during the recent catastrophic floods. Some 70 guests have been invited […]

Read the story of how Sylvia set up the Venkat Trust in January’s Choice magazine

SUNDAY 20 DECEMBER 8am – 11am. During the recent terrible floods Kovalam’s sandy beach disappeared under a mass of rubbish and so The Venkat Trust and Bhumi Trust have organised a massive beach clean-up with some 325 volunteers for this Sunday. More helpers are needed so please tell anyone you know in the Chennai area […]

Sylvia and fellow trustee Lindsay Swan were delighted to be joined on their last Kovalam visit by friend and VMT supporter, Dame Margaret Drabble, the eminent novelist, biographer and editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Read her impressions of her stay in our May 2015 Newsletter Margaret joins the young onlookers to watch […]

Aarthi, VMT’s fantastic administrator in Kovalam, sent these pictures to us explaining “The annual day celebration of the Govt. High School and Primary School may also be added since normally Govt. Schools and large number of Private schools does not celebrate annual days. But we have celebrated the Annual Day and the Graduation Day in […]

After weeks of training, the day of the Clontarf Half Marathon dawned at last. VMT supporter Julian Kulkarni had set the ambitious target of £2,000 for his fundraising but his most optimistic expectations were exceeded and the total has now reached an incredible £2,785. Not only that but Julian completed the run in under two […]

The Trust’s Tenth Anniversary celebrations were held on Sunday, 27 April at the Sussex County Cricket Ground in Hove. The main purpose of the curry lunch – a sell out with supporters coming from all over the country – was to honour the three Kovalam trustees who have played such a pivotal role in the […]

So successful was last year’s Christmas card – we were delighted with the number of compliments we received – that we’ve produced another this year which we hope will be just as popular. We’ve also limited stocks of last year’s card. As before, all production and processing stocks are met by the trustees but we […]

Congratulations and many thanks to VMT supporter Richard Pitcairn-Knowles, who completed the London Marathon this year and raised £6000, a third of it for VMT. He still found time to write an art history book “The Unfinished Monk” about a fascinating ancestor, James Pitcairn-Knowles, a Scottish Nabis artist who lived in Europe in the 19th […]

We’ve made a short YouTube film with help from VMT supporter Mike Mirams, who has edited our rather shaky footage. It shows a little of everyday life in Kovalam, including the Primary School and a family sports day. Things have changed already of course with the opening of the High School. Click here to watch […]

Congratulations to Richard Pitcairn Knowles, our octogenarian runner in the London Marathon. Despite lack of training due to an Achilles tendon problem, he “limped to the finish” – as he puts it – in 6.32 hours . Bravo. He would like to thank all the VMT supporters who kindly contributed to over £5,650 in aid […]

From a room in the name of your choice for £4,000, to a tenner for a classroom sign, there are lots of ways to play a part in building the splendid new Kovalam High School. Happily, thanks to all the donations we have had over the past couple of years, we have the money – […]

At last, the High School has been blessed – both by the authorities who have finally given us the green light to start building and by the earth Goddess. The Bhoomi Puja (Bhoomi means ‘earth’) ceremony has been performed by JR and the chief mason and work will start soon. Jude, one of our Kovalam […]

Six years ago the literacy rate among Kovalam’s children was just 60%. Today it is 95% and VMT can take a lot of credit for this vast improvement. Before our involvement with the Panchayat school, there were too few classrooms, too few and unqualified teachers, and the attendance record of the pupils was poor. At […]

Despite permission being given for the High School when Sylvia visited Kovalam at the beginning of September, there has been yet another bureaucratic glitch. We have been assured that work will get underway very shortly. There is some good news however. Because of the delay and our supporters’ generosity, we now have more funds available. […]

The first Venkat Trust Volleyball Tournament took place over a weekend in the spring. Twenty teams from Kovalam, the surrounding villages, Chennai and as far away as Pondicherry, some 80 miles down the coast, took part. Several local dignitaries attended the Finals which were won by the Pondicherry team – their captain is seen here […]