Grassroots.org

Often running more than one mission-driven program, nonprofits would agree that assistance for their own organizations is hard to come by, but very rewarding when they do receive it. Here's a karma-filled story from Heaven's Helpers, one of our latest nonprofit member organizations.

Since February 2007, Heaven’s Helpers has been committed to providing a hand to those facing a crisis or extreme poverty. We recycle clothes, linens, household items and furniture and donate them to clients referred to us by social services agencies, churches and schools.

One of our current projects is a program for kids and teens called “Got Your Back”. All children and adolescents who have been removed from their homes due to fire, natural disaster, domestic violence, or were placed into foster care receive a backpack filled with clothes, underwear, pajamas, a book, and a stuffed animal.

We are also launching a program for women returning to the workforce and unable to afford interview clothes. Each participant receives one interview-appropriate outfit, including purse, shoes and other accessories. After she successfully finds a job, she is given four additional work appropriate outfits.

We received our own donation and help through the Grassroots.org Toolbox, Heaven’s Helpers was able to create a manageable site using the web builder and through collaborating with Southeastern Louisiana University’s web design students. This partnership gave students hands-on experience with designing a professional website, and we look forward to using more resources and collaborating to further develop our online fan base!

Visit our site to find more information!

Jenice Heiman
Volunteer Director
[email protected]

As one of our African nonprofit members, HOPE Children's Foundation Africa is educating Ugandan youth as well as the online community with their site. Read their guest post below to find out how.

Hope Children's Foundation Africa is a charitable organization in the Kawempe Division of Kampala, Uganda. Our vision is to support the health, education and safety of the orphans, widows and other vulnerable groups in surrounding communities. We also have an international team working hard to ensure the charity extends support to African communities in Canada and the UK.

HCAF's most popular program is the Education Support Program that assists children in these African communities. Most families in Kawempe face extreme poverty, and there is a high level of HIV/AIDS. We believe every child has a right to an education, because through basic education families are empowered to improve their quality of life and develop their communities. HCFA assists children of Kawempe by sponsoring their entire educational experience. We currently have 100 children participating in our Education Support Program, and 79 of them are attending school and being supported with other free scholastic needs. We’re working on finding sponsorships for the remaining 21 children in our program. A donation of $60 sponsors one child through an entire semester of education (4 months), including school fees, materials, uniforms and school meals.

Grassroots.org's Toolbox provided us an opportunity to present our work online, which essentially educates and attracts potential supporters worldwide. Most recently, we connected with a Grassroots.org volunteer to help design a website for our new volunteer initiative that aims to match our own volunteers at work sites all over Uganda.

We extend our thanks to the Grassroots.org team for the wonderful services they are providing to our communities!

Ochieng Kennedy, Vice-chairman
Catherine Oliver, Project Manager
HOPE Children's Foundation Africa
www.hcfafrica.org

As crucial as it is for nonprofits to build up a web presence and social media, it's important to remember sometimes we prefer speaking to you via the phone. Maintaining an organizational phone line helps with member support, development and media-related conversations. Having developed a website already, here's another way Buddy Cruise Inc. stayed connected virtually.

Buddy Cruise Inc. is a nonprofit that provides educational opportunities and resources for families while promoting awareness, acceptance, inclusion and advancement for individuals with Down syndrome. Our events are a forum for prominent educational speakers to address a wide range of Down syndrome and disability-related topics.

Buddy Cruise is unique because we not only give families the opportunity to gain information through educational workshops & events, but they are able to network with other families from across the globe that are in similar situations and form lasting bonds. All of this is done on a cruise ship allowing for inclusive opportunities throughout the ship and in the various ports of call. Families who otherwise have a very hard time finding a scenario to meet all family members’ needs are accommodated with a variety of activities for all ages and abilities.

When not cruising, the nonprofit is involved with awareness events and The Special Olympic Young Athletes Program. This is a program geared towards 2 to 7 year-olds with intellectual disabilities and their peers, designed to introduce them to the world of sports. It helps them to improve physically, cognitively and socially while preparing children to graduate to official Special Olympics training and competition when they turn 8 years old.

Through Grassroots.org's Toolbox, we are currently utilizing the virtual office resource. It has really made a world of difference, allowing us to communicate more effectively with the families we serve. We even were able to customize a phone number for our organization (1-877-BDY-CRUZ). Because of the nature of our organization we are always on the go, attending conferences, taking part or hosting awareness events or off cruising across the ocean. Thanks to Grassroots.org, we never have to miss a call! With this service we can have the calls routed directly to us wherever we may be, including cell phones and even our email. It is an amazing service we would not have known about if it had not been for Grassroots.org. Thank you for your support, Grassroots.org!

Visit the Buddy Cruise website for more information!

Pamela Arnoldson
Director, Buddy Cruise

National Volunteer Week was last month, but Museum Africa proves that volunteers can help nonprofits all year and virtually, too! Our volunteer program has helped their organization develop a better web presence online. Read on to see how volunteer work has had a lasting impact on the organization.

At Museum Africa, Inc. our mission is to share in the preservation, exploration and appreciation of continental Africa's unique cultural and ecological histories through education, community and the pursuit of academic excellence. Founded in 2005, our collection currently holds over 200,000 individual items. The museum operates at two physical sites, the Chicago Metropolitan Museum and Library of African History and Kush University’s Library, and virtually through our web showcase.

Volunteers have been an integral part of Museum Africa's development from its inception. The dream of our organization’s web presence became a reality thanks to a team of volunteers from around the world. Grassroots.org, with its vast reservoir of volunteer talent, has been vital in helping us find the technical and creative skills we needed for a project of this scope.

Our initial need for a web designer to redesign our website led us to sign up with Grassroots.org. Through their volunteer programs, we were able to receive graphic design and web design assistance within three months. One volunteer, a talented and experienced web and graphic designer, suggested that we change our domain name from "museumafrica.us" to "museumafrica.org" to give us more credibility. This was something we hadn't considered before, and we promptly took her up on her suggestion. Another volunteer, who lives halfway around the world, is completing a re-design of our logo to reflect the overall purpose of a museum of this type, something that is missing in our current logo.

In addition to help with design, we received free access to the virtual phone suite, which will be helpful for future virtual meetings. Due to the success we have had so far, our organization anticipates use of the content filtering, project management and the "We Care" feature.

With a newly redesigned site we can host and develop our virtual showcase as well as display our mission globally. Check out our site at http://museumafrica.org.

Earl Smith
Chairman/Executive Director

Charles Franklin
Vice-Chairman/Volunteer Coordinator

Creating significant impact for a few is sometimes more effective than trying to change an entire community. By providing support for twenty families in Nicaragua, Friends of Families United understands this concept well. Their numbers clearly indicate that full dedication to a small group can create large-scale impact.

The basic mission at Friends of Families United is to help twenty extremely poor families in Esteli, Nicaragua that are struggling to educate their kids and keep them healthy. Mothers in these families are mostly single moms with very limited skills who earn as little as $2 a day (just $320 per year) working as domestics, or doing washing and ironing. Families like these form a quarter of the populace in Nicaragua, which is second only to Haiti in terms of poverty.

These families—-20 mothers, several fathers, 50 school-aged kids and 30 older teens and grandparents—-are organized into a support group called the Families United Association, with their own Coordinating Committee to manage activities within the group. An Executive Board in the U.S. interacts with a Committee of Care in Nicaragua to carry out the actual work of the organization by using funds provided by our member donors to create programs and monitor them.

The Friends here in the U.S. sponsor individual kids by providing them with targeted funding in areas of education, health and nutrition. For a $120 annual child sponsorship we are able to:

• send these 50 kids to school (with uniforms, shoes, and school supplies).
• give them two medical exams a year, plus daily vitamins and calcium
• provide them with fresh veggies year-round (from the Garden of Hope).

Beyond this basic safety net of programs-—which actually benefit the entire family—-we also help the families improve their housing (for example, by replacing leaky metal roofs) and financial security (with a savings and loan fund to which we give matching dollars). These programs spell H-O-P-E for these families living in extreme poverty.

Our Executive Board has used the Grassroots.org Toolbox primarily to establish a website. The self-editing tools that Grassroots.org provides nonprofits free of charge allow us to tell our story more effectively through words and photos. We are using our new website to keep our current members informed of our activities and also to encourage them to use our online donation service. To further raise our profile, we use a newsletter to activate our members and reach out to prospective donors. Anyone can obtain a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, the UPDATE, by going to our website and clicking on “Contact Us".

We now have an attractive online presence! Thank you, Grassroots.org!

-John De Jong
[email protected]
Friends of Families United

After international health and development specialist Pamela Pine (PhD, MPH) organized a coalition of groups to address child sexual abuse (CSA) in 2002, Stop the Silence was born. Later, the conception of an annual Race to Stop the Silence catapulted the organization’s goal to raise awareness about CSA. Read on to find out what the organization is doing today and how they’re expanding their involvement.

Child Sexual Abuse, or CSA, occurs in epidemic proportions around the world, often with devastating consequences. Stop the Silence is a 501(c)3 organization looking to expose and stop CSA and help survivors heal worldwide. Our Goals are to help stop CSA and related forms of violence, promote healing of victims and survivors and celebrate the lives of those healed. We work on a comprehensive platform to address the complexity of issues regarding CSA from a number of perspectives. Our areas of focus are: support for services, advocacy, training of service providers, community education and outreach, policy, research and evaluation and other prevention measures (e.g., a focus on offenders).

Grassroots.org has allowed us to explore a host of possible mechanisms through which we can get our message out and attract people to learn more or support our cause. On top of that, we received help with the redesign and development of our web site and reach regarding our Queendom T.E.A. (The Etiquette Academy) Program, for which Stop the Silence is a parent organization.

Visit our sites to learn more about Stop the Silence or Queendom TEA.

Pamela Pine, Founder and CEO
Stop the Silence
&
LaQuisha Hall, International Spokesperson
Queendom T.E.A.

The Sachse Historical Society was established in 1989 to install a pride of community in the young people of Sachse, preserve historical objects and data representing Sachse and keep the community’s heritage alive and available to the public. Our stated mission is, “Preserving the past for the enlightenment of the present generation and recording the present for the benefit of future generations.”

Most recently, we’ve restored our 1948 Ahrens-Fox Fire Engine and received a historic marker from the Texas Historic Commission for one of Sachse's first public buildings. We are currently restoring a 1939 Allis Chalmers Model B tractor, expanding our antique farm equipment exhibit, building a Sachse Veterans' Exhibit and collecting oral histories. In collaboration with the Sachse Public Library we are seeking a grant to digitize The Sachse Sentinel, the bound editions of Sachse's first newspaper that are in possession of the Sachse Historical Society.

The Sachse Historical Society makes use of the Grassroots.org Toolbox to host our website. We chose the Doodlekit Web Builder option because it allows non-programmers to maintain the website and keep the content fresh. Our website is the window to the Historical Society and Museum; it allows people from around the world to find us and connect our organization with the Sachse family’s history and collections Our website has become a key component of communication among members and with the community.

As a result of being able to share these resources with the community, we have been contacted by Nicolette B. Meister, a collections curator from the Logan Museum of Anthropology, who is co-authoring a new small museum book series to be published by AltaMira/AASLH. Nicollette found the following collections policy on our website and is using the text as a sidebar in the chapter on that subject: "The distilled version of your collections plan is an excellent example of how the importance of collections planning and target collecting areas can be conveyed to the public in a very concise, straightforward way."

We’re also using TierraNet’s free email service through the Toolbox. Using that and mail forwarding, we created professional email addresses that can remain unchanged as the membership evolves. To find out more, feel free to check out our website or email us at [email protected], one of the addresses we setup thanks to Grassroots.org!

-Karen Reed
President, Sachse Historical Society