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This article discusses how Buffalo City Mission, which helps with the needs of poor and homeless families is teaming up with SofTrek Corporation. SofTrek corporation helps many nonprofits by providing donor management software, online marketing and fundraising tools, business services, and technology solutions. It's great that there are corporations out there that work with nonprofits to help them achieve their mission.

Simple use by New York city of QR codes on building permits to provide links to additional information. 

Wow. Just think, I didn't even know what QR codes were a few weeks ago. I really see them blooming in the next few years (Ha!Bloomberg/ Blooming!). I scanned one from a Meijers grocery coupon and got a 10 second commercial sent back to me.

Very progressive! Excellent use for that specific labeling technology --- especially in a high density population area where a construction project could be a big hassle. This would make it easy for the public passerby to find out more about it, and perhaps a target completion date. Plus, you are certain the contractor has a legal permit from the city of New York for the work they are doing.

This is a survey using information from 238 non profit organizations in seattle. I found it easy to read and interpret. It's a great snapshot of IT use and needs by non profits in a US city.

My subject of discussion on posterous this week was about Grand Rapids trying to pass a millage for the Rapid this May. Improved public transit has proven to spur economic growth in "dying" cities (or areas of cities). Better transportation means better employment, incentives to build businesses, and saving money on gas!

New York City-based Catchafire, a business that links nonprofits with skilled volunteers who are ready to perform discrete, pro bono tasks. The goal is two-fold: to help nonprofits build capacity within their organization by using volunteers and to provide professionals with high-quality, skills-based volunteer experiences.

In Kansas City, they are involving the church with credit cards

This is a website that I found off of the GVSU library database collection. You can use this to look up a foundation or nonprofit. There are many different search categories too. For example, you could look up all of the foundations in Michigan, but then narrow your search to a city like Grand Rapids, or a county like Kent.

I did some volunteering with this organization this past weekend. A group of about 50 students from Grand Valley went and disassembled over 230 computers. CompRenew Environmental recycles old electronics (tvs, computers, microwaves….basically anything with a plug) and keeps them from going into landfills. They then refurbish the electronics and sell them, or they disassemble them and sell the parts, or just recycle them. All of the money they get from the recycled electronics goes to education in over 44 countries. CompRenew is a really neat company. Hopefully their idea will spread and more cities will be able to recycle old electronics.

Goodwill and MacMedia both have related recycling / refurbishing interests around the state: http://www.goodwillwm.org/donate/computer-recycling--reuse and http://www.macmedia.org/care.html, respectively.

Responsibly recycle your electronics.

This article discusses the new and different ways people now get their information about things that are happening in the news. It is all about using social media to do this. Cities, towns and counties are taking advantage of these social media websites and it is helping them reach out to more people. People are already on these websites daily, so it is more convenient. It helps to engage the citizens. These new social media tools have also helped lower many costs.