Congratulations to our new officers!

• President: Amy Allen
• Vice President/Processing Chair: Lushima Lumumba-Kasongo
• Treasurer: Max Ke
• Publicity Chair: Ruth-Anne Langan

Good luck next year!

Also here’s an update of recent news:

• 25 Desktops were donated to the Columbus House Orphanage for Boys and Girls in Grand Bahama!
• 50 Desktops were donated to South Africa to various schools in conjunction with Teachers Across Borders! These computers will serve over 1000 students!
• 50 Desktops will be packed and donated to schools in Ghana. Packing will start tomorrow (5/22) at 5pm if anyone is still in town.
• Father Abue, who runs an orphanage in Nigeria that we’ve donated computers to in the past, visited Al this week. Using CCRA comptuers, he’s set up a computer school along side the orphanage and showed us a couple of pictures. Check them out in our gallery under the “Orphange in Nigeria” album!
• Some CCRA members will be travelling to Zambia in a couple of weeks. Each of us will bring along a laptop or two that we shall be donating to various schools/orphanages/community centers that we will visit there.

CCRA is headed to YAAPD (April 12 – 14) http://www.yaapd.org/
We need more boxes. We currently have four boxes.

Reminder to Al: Buy more boxes

Packing party for the Bahamas! Monday night starting at 6 PM.

Michael is making videos for teaching people about simple IT tasks, processing computers, and teaching our end users about computer maintenance. If anyone is interested, they should contact him (mgn29).

—-
Mike

On Tuesday 10/20/2012 we had our packing party to send 15 computers to St. John’s #5 Faith Church in New Orleans, in collaboration with St. John’s in Ithaca and a Cornell staff member, Mr. Mike Roman. We got together in Rice Hall, organized, tested and packed all the computers and they will be off to New Orleans soon!

We also heard back from HoHoe, Ghana and our shipment there was received successfully! Once again, a job well done to everyone involved. From Ghana:

On behalf of the management of CNG, staff and on my own behalf, we wish to express our profound gratitude to you for the huge support. I will like to assure that the computers will be used solely for the purpose for which they were sent. 

 Stay tuned for more shipment news!

We’ve done a lot of hard work so far this semester and have a lot more to do! Here is a brief outline of the projects we’ve done so far this semester and a hint at what we might have ahead of us. This summary is subject to change in future updates.

Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC) [Complete]
Website: http://www.ci.ithaca.ny.us/departments/giac/index.cfm
Purpose of donation: computers will be used to support educational and recreational programs at the GIAC center for the Ithaca community.
Computers given: 4 total units, Dell desktops

Roatán, Honduras in collaboration with C2C Pals and Brain Spaces [Complete]
Website: www.c2cpals.org/
Purpose of donation: computers will be used at a library and e-learning center for students on the island of Roatan teaching young and adult students.
Computers given: 16 total units, Dell desktops

HoHoe, Ghana in collaboration with Care Net Ghana and AIESEC [Complete]
Website: http://www.carenetghana.org/, http://rso.cornell.edu/aiesec/
Purpose of donation: computers will be used to teach junior and senior high student computer skills in a safe environment and promote technology literacy in West Africa.
Computers given: 15 total units, Dell desktops

New Orleans, LA (St. John’s #5 Faith Church) in collaboration with St. John’s of Ithaca [Packing Party Planned]
Website: http://www.loveknowsnobounds.org/, http://stjohnsithaca.org/
Purpose of donation: computers will be used training at-risk youth in employable skills/replacing units destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Natal, SA in collaboration with Teachers Without Borders – South Africa [PENDING]
Website: http://tab-sa.org/
Purpose of donation: computers will be installed in school serving over 4,000 students and further technology literacy and educational opportunities for those who would otherwise not have access to them.

Sanniquellie, Liberia in collaboration with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies [PENDING]
Website: http://www.nimbacountycommunitycollege.com/
Purpose of donation: support educational initiatives at Nimba College as well as staff, build upon success of initial donation in 2011

Santa Fe, NM (Pueblo Indians) in collaboration with local tribal centers [PENDING]
Purpose of donation: computers will be used in a community center to help Pueblo children prepare to move on to post-secondary education at schools like Cornell

Kenya and Southern Sudan in collaboration with the Grow Biointensive Agriculture Center of Kenya (G-BIACK) [PENDING]
Website: http://www.g-biack.org/
Purpose of donation: computers will be used to coordinate agricultural learning efforts to eradicate poverty and improve the living standard of the resource poor communities through sustainable agriculture.

Sweetings Cay, Grand Bahamas in collaboration with Joe Kohler, Hotel ‘71 [PENDING]
Website: (see Freeport News articles)
Purpose of donation: further mission of placing computers in Grand Bahamian schools after our efforts last year, support the amalgamation of current schools.

We had a great visit from Art Groos, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, today and went over important items on our agenda. Mr. Groos spoke to us about a project donating computers to get Pueblo Indian students in New Mexico access to the computers they desperately need to further their educational opportunities and apply for post-secondary education. Pending certain details, we will likely be taking on this project in the near future. Thank you, Art, for coming out and joining us today. We also showed Mr. Groos our space in Rice Hall where we store and process computers.

Additionally, we discussed the order of our projects once again and set plans for our next processing and packing parties. These events will occur on Friday 10/19 and Tuesday 10/23, in collaboration with St. John’s church of Ithaca and Mike Roman.

We met at 5:00pm in Rice Hall 305, received a new donation of over 20 computers and monitors and discussed the implementation of our current donations queue. We expect to be fulfilling two new requests in the coming week or so as our processing ability ramps up. We are also working on one very large request to complete this semester.

The computers for C2C Pals shipped successfully today and congratulations to all that were involved. These computers are on their way to Roatan, Honduras and we will hear about their impact shortly.

We also had a guest at our meeting, Mr. Mike Roman from the LEPP Group at Cornell. Mr. Roman spoke about his donation request to a sister church in New Orleans that will train youth in important job skills. This church previously had the ability to do so but was compromised by Hurricane Katrina and no longer has the funds to purchase new computers and train young adults in employable skills.

Our next meeting will be at the standard time, 5:00pm on Tuesday 9/25 location TBA.

We met today and went over the priority of donations we have been fielding requests for as well as sorted out some issues over projects we’ve already worked on. We are currently fielding requests for a large number of computers and hope to successfully complete them all. Shipping details are the major complication with most donations.

We resolved that the standard meeting time will be 5:00pm on Tuesdays with organizational meetings taking place in central locations around campus and all computer-related meetings in our room in Rice Hall.

Thanks for all who came to the meeting and see everyone again soon!

We met on Tuesday evening at 5pm in Rice and:

• unloaded 40 new computers that we will be donating very shortly to organizations
• showed new members our processing and storage space
• talked about our goals and a few projects

Mike is currently working on streamlining out new refurbishing/processing method with new members.

At the next meeting, we’ll go over all of the donations that have been requested and prioritize them.