Benetech

Please help us give the gift of reading to veterans with print disabilities by supporting our Bookshare for Veterans crowdfunding campaign on CrowdRise. Our goal is to extend Bookshare services to our veterans and provide them with access to the books they need for education, employment and inclusion in society. To support this, we just launched a crowdfunding campaign as part of the Skoll Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurs Challenge on CrowdRise. The Challenge is an 8-week campaign geared towards helping the world’s leading social enterprises raise money, awareness and resources for their causes. Join us! Support our Challenge—Benetech’s Bookshare for Veterans. Because everyone deserves the right to read.

How can journalists better protect their information, themselves and the sources, victims and witnesses who trust them with their stories? How can mobile technologies help journalists working in conflict areas to quickly alert national and international support organizations when they or colleagues are injured, arrested, kidnapped or killed? These are some of the questions our Human Rights team is considering these days, as we’re moving forward with building the next generation of Martus technology. These were also some of the questions addressed by a team of technologists and journalists at the July 2013 TechCamp workshop in New York City, which I attended as a representative of Benetech.

Upstart Business Journal mentioned our CEO, Jim Fruchterman, among a handful of MacArthur Fellows who are also startup entrepreneurs. The story notes that, while many MacArthur Fellows are academics who remain largely unknown to the rest of the world, at least a handful took their prizes and started companies. It features Jim among these “MacArthur-winning Einsteins from some startups we know and love.”

Today, at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Benetech announced a Commitment to Action — the defining feature of CGI — to increase service and expand the number of accessible books for the blind in India through its Bookshare International initiative. CGI defines a Commitment to Action as a plan for addressing a significant global challenge and requires that the commitment be new, specific and measureable. Benetech will embark on this work with support from the Lavelle Fund for the Blind and Google.

My name is Jordan Gould and I am from Brantford, Ontario, Canada, a town about an hour south of Toronto. I am currently in my second year of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario. I found the Benetech projects interesting because I am a person with low vision and have in the past used DAISY formatted books on CD with a specialized CD player. Since smartphones and tablets are more ubiquitous now, I believe that contributing to Go Read can help expand access and usability of DAISY books in an academic environment.