Hope Childrens Home in Uganda

Show Your Impact Contest – Category 2 – Optimize Mission DeliveryShow Mercy International is a small non-profit based in Albany, Oregon serving the poor near our home, in Uganda, East Africa and India since 2004. So small in fact, until 2008, we only had 2 part-time employees. To maximize our impact on our local and International communities we rely heavily on our incredible volunteers and on the generosity of Microsoft technologies from TechSoup.The use of Microsoft Office 2007 has allowed us to create emails, documents, and spreadsheets that clearly and creatively communicate to our staff, our donors, and our volunteers on 3 continents. Our new Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 enables us to share files and remotely access our databases when we are onsite at our International locations. We are so grateful for Microsoft and TechSoup. There is little more effective than having a life-changing experience of witnessing the harshness or incomprehensible beauty of another human’s experience and being able to almost instantly share that experience with blog or video posts to educated and inspire others to keep going despite trying to tackle the daunting challenges of injustice and poverty. When an organization functions almost exclusively off of donations the time and treasures of others, consistent communication, fast follow-ups, and maintaining momentum is key. Microsoft and TechSoup have allowed us to gain much ground in these areas. On the more practical side, Microsoft technologies have sped up our decision making processes when part of the decision making team is on another continent from the rest of the team. For example, one of our volunteers was in Gganda Village, Uganda and looking for a way to visually, yet simply, communicate to the home office the current room situations and potential architectural improvements that could upgrade the privacy and comfort of the children and room mothers living at Hope Children’s Home. This volunteer is not very computer savvy, but she had a laptop with Excel. She used the spreadsheet like graph paper and the borders function to show room assignments, how many children were in a bed, and where current doors were and where they should be to optimize the space. With this approach, no scanner was necessary for sketches and the locals, who would be in charge of implementation, could easily understand the plan and agree to it, or make changes to the plan easily even with cultural and language differences. This same volunteer almost exclusively functioned off of the free hotmail account provided by MSN and the kindness of strangers. After returning from a working trip to Uganda, she was in a bad car accident that affected her memory. She began to email all of her work to herself so that if she forgot something she had researched or even forgot her laptop, (which she was very prone to do) she would just ask for access to a computer and retrieve all of her thoughts and research from her hotmail account. This free service kept her from becoming too discouraged to continue volunteering until her body and brain had a chance to heal fully. Just as she was getting her short-term memory under control, her lap-top was stolen out of her car. But because she had been emailing everything to herself with her account set to save all sent messages, and Microsoft had increased the amount of storage available on their free email accounts, she lost very little information, and was not so discouraged that she couldn’t continue volunteering. Microsoft genuinely has directed your passion into our potential through the donations from TechSoup. And it is the desire of Show Mercy International to direct our passions for reaching out in love and answering the cry of injustice by encouraging and equipping the potential and others. We are so appreciative of this partnership with all of you and look forward to continued impact on major humanitarian issues. The only way we can repay all of our donors, including Microsoft and TechSoup, is to exemplify teamwork and interdependence so that together we truly can meet the challenges of global poverty and injustice. Show Mercy International