For those of you following along with Team4Tech these past few months, you’ll know it has been a busy time – we completed a 16-day project in Tanzania in November with 11 amazing volunteers from Intel, Intuit and Facebook, and then we moved right into our Vietnam project in February with 11 equally amazing volunteers from VMware. We are now busy planning for two more exciting projects in April: in India with Intuit, and Tanzania with volunteers from Intel, Facebook, Coursera, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Intersol.
In the midst of all of this project planning, we had an unexpected surprise when the organizers of the CLASSY Awards, the largest social impact awards event in the US, reached out to us in mid-November to encourage us to apply for the award. We were allowed to nominate one or more of our specific projects, and so we chose our Kenya collaboration with Orphans Overseas (now KidSpire) since it had the most rigorous impact data. We explained how the English literacy test scores for first and second graders in the first school where we implemented the Waterford Early Learning software improved by over 100% on average in the first four months of usage in late 2013.
The CLASSY Awards process became one thrill after another as our application steadily advanced to each successive stage of the competition, culminating in the announcement at the end of February that we had been selected as one of the top five nominees in the subcategory of projects to improve Educational Quality and Completion.
We are so honored to be among many other fantastic CLASSY nominees and looking forward to the collaborative workshops scheduled for the awards weekend on May 2-3 in San Diego. We can’t wait to learn from the innovative organizations and foundations who will be represented there, and to take a moment to exhale and reflect after this exciting journey over the past year. Big thanks to all of our partners on the Kenya project – Orphans Overseas, Waterford Institute, Intel, VMware, Mustek, without whom none of this work would be possible!
