Today, #GivingTuesday, is all about giving back to support causes that make the world better, and volunteering time and talent can be a great way to do that. If you are looking for technical skills-based volunteer opportunities with real, lasting impact and active learning though service, then we, at Benetech, invite you to join a growing global community of technical contributors—software designers, developers, product managers, translators, technical writers, quality assurance engineers, and more—who make a difference by volunteering with our SocialCoding4Good initiative.
We’ve just wrapped up a second successful year of Benetech’s Summer Internship Program. Today we’re pleased to introduce you to three excellent interns who worked with our Bookshare team: Priyanka Amin-Patel, Derek Slone, and Tara Singh. Their efforts went towards getting the word out about Bookshare and expanding the collection.
Across the U.S., thousands of students with print disabilities will start their school year without the textbooks they need for class. These students need their books converted to accessible formats. To meet that need, the Benetech Volunteer Program is launching a new project for the 2014-15 school year, Team-Up for Textbooks, to recruit volunteer teams to proofread student requested textbooks—and we’re inviting you to join us!
Did you know that April is National Volunteer Month? We’d like to take this opportunity to recognize and thank Benetech’s fantastic community of dedicated volunteers who amplify the positive impact we make in the lives of our beneficiaries. In this post, we’ll highlight the wonderful contributions of our student volunteers from Brigham Young University, who regularly meet to describe Bookshare textbook images, as well as the impact created through our SocialCoding4Good initiative that operates at the hub of technology-for-good volunteer engagement.
I’m delighted to share with you today a wonderful success story from our Volunteer Program. UC Santa Cruz students who participated in our volunteer pilot project—proofreading textbooks for our Bookshare collection—have done a fantastic job proofreading over a short period of time three entire textbooks! This means more than 2,300 pages of text and an amazing gift for the 250,000+ Bookshare student members we serve.