I’ve been helping with a couple non-profit websites for more than a few years now, and I’ve been bad in that I haven’t mentioned them or even linked to them. Oops. Perhaps part of why I haven’t done much with these sites is that I rarely have to do anything to them. That was my original goal in setting them up so that the people running the organization could modify the information on the sites however they wanted without having to wait for me. To do this I set the sites up running Drupal and WordPress, two great site management technologies both written in PHP.
The first is Espaanglisch, which is a great English teaching volunteer program near Trujillo, Peru for lower income students of all ages. I taught there for a month in 2007 when Kim and I lived in Huanchaco, and I helped the guy running the program, David, build a website so that he could attract more volunteers. Learning English really is a great way to open up a ton of employment opportunities for these children. I recently found out how important the website has been to helping David attract volunteers when it stopped functioning for a few weeks because of DNS issues. Fortunately the DNS issues resolved themselves. If you want to travel and volunteer in South America, this is a great place as you’ll feel immediately appreciated and you can even learn to surf in your off hours.
Some other friends of ours name Becka and Michael have been doing a lot of work in Uganda, Africa for years helping to protect the Kibale National Forest. Their most recent project, the New Nature Foundation, aims to help protect the forest by improving the lives of and educating the people who live around it. They’ve made great strides, as can be seen in their latest reports showing they’ve reduced the number of people gathering wood inside the national park from over 30% to around 10%. They done this in a number of interesting and innovative ways including teaching the locals to build more efficient stoves, and growing their own wood from fast growing trees that they plant themselves. The project is ongoing and always accepting donations.
I’m grateful to be able to help these dedicated people in some small way with what expertise I have, and I hope they continue to thrive.