18:01, 10 June 2009
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In the late 1990s, I co-wrote The
Virtual Volunteering Guidebook with Susan Ellis. It is a free manual to help organizations involve online volunteers, as well as to use online tools to support all volunteers. I am currently revising this Guidebook.
If you ever have been a volunteer, OR if you have worked with volunteers in *any* capacity -- side-by-side or as a manager/primary staff contact --
I invite you to complete this survey regarding the use of online tools to support volunteers, to help me in my efforts to revise this guidebook.
By
volunteer, I mean someone who has provided some kind of work support without pay to a nonprofit organization, community-based group (such as a school), or government initiative focused on the community (such as a city-sponsored park cleanup).
When talking about your experience, you can talk about more than one organization. But remember that most questions relate to your experience only regarding volunteering or working with volunteers.
Please note that
this survey is NOT limited to any country or region.
I plan to share the results in the next edition of the
Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. To know when the guidebook is released, please subscribe to my blog (which you are reading now) or
Tech4Impact (my email newsletter).
Thanks, and feel free to spread the word!
11:19, 10 June 2009
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Differences are a fact of life. Differences are normal. Unfortunately, people are often excluded from society, education and work because of their difference, such as a disability. But the good news is that addressing the needs of one group of people deemed "different" often makes a project or product more accessible and useful to
everyone: that bathroom stall for people in wheelchairs gets used by a woman with children; closed-captioning for the hearing-impaired is used much more by people learning English and on TVs in bars and restaurants; offering a text transcript of a podcast allows people who prefer to read than listen, or who don't have headphones and are sharing an office, to access the info; and on and on.
Make Development Inclusive is a project working to ensure that people with disabilities are served by the development policies of the European Union Member States, the European Commission, and European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the fields of development cooperation and humanitarian aid. The site has great resources for anyone working in aid and development, not just people from the EU or funded by the EU.
Just as
I mainstream gender issues but I'm not a gender specialist, you can make your development and humanitarian aid work accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities, without being an expert in such. It's all about your approach and your attitude. Why leave anyone out?
