By Gerry Sinzdak, a Business Development Fellow at Benetech

Bookshare.org continues to make tremendous progress in making books accessible to individuals with visual impairments or learning disabilities. Thanks to the generous donations already made through GlobalGiving (48% of our goal in 2003), we have been able to produce 50 books for school-aged readers.

It's exciting to be able to see the direct impact of these donations on making reading material available so quickly for young people with disabilities. As a special education teacher at one of our partner schools recently told us, "You guys are the ultimate source [for accessible reading materials]. Nobody has the books you have."

On other fronts, we have been forging ahead with key partnerships that illustrate our ability to leverage our model, for example:

• Indiana University is providing close to 2,000 books that have already been scanned for their students
   
• Lighthouse International in New York City has been scanning important materials and we recently unveiled a special collection of employment and career resources that was developed in partnership with the Lighthouse
   
• We have launched our first project to provide electronic textbooks and reading materials to students in developing countries where printed books are either out-dated, prohibitively expensive or nonexistent. Over the next year we will supply updated books and textbooks to students in the medical, nursing and public health schools at the University of Mosul in Iraq.

Your support is critical to help us continue to meet the Bookshare.org's promise: low cost production of accessible books resulting in fast access to reading in flexible formats that are optimizable to the needs of the individual's disability.

Resources

• Read about the "Accessible Books for Students with Disabilities" project on GlobalGiving
   
• See Bookshare's 2003 funding total
   
• Email the people at Bookshare for more information

New features recently launched on GlobalGiving.com make finding the perfect social or economic development project even easier.

The first thing you will notice is that our new project pages are more readable and user-friendly. GlobalGiving provides donors with even more project information so you'll know exactly what you're funding before you give.

In addition to more information about the project, we've added a profile for the country where the project is being implemented. You'll find statistics and demographics for every country in the world, so you can better understand the economic, political and social context surrounding the social entrepreneur as you give. To check it out, please click the icon on the top of a project page.

We've also added a catalog of all the projects funded in 2003. As reports come in from the project leaders, updates and photos will be posted on these pages. See how much funding your project raised!

And this is just the beginning! Over the next couple of months we're going to be working on many more donor-friendly features including a shopping cart to help you keep track of projects you've supported. You can look forward to seeing this and a whole slew of other features this fall.

Resources

• See a project update
   
• See the funded project catalog
   
• Tell us how we can improve the GlobalGiving Web site

By Joel Gay, Anchorage Daily News
(Published: June 28, 2004)

Native leaders are looking around the globe for ideas to create jobs and bring cash to rural Alaska, using knowledge as the foundation of a new economy. A forum in Anchorage today and Tuesday aims to start the process.

The World Bank and Harvard University's Center for International Development will be there. So will Nobel Prize-winning economists, Native corporations and tribes, education experts and a smattering of influential senators and chief executives...

...Dennis Whittle, a former World Bank staff member who now heads a nonprofit called GlobalGiving, will talk about the success his group has had with a program called Development Marketplace. The Denali Commission has agreed to start a similar program in Alaska, through the Alaska Department of Community and Economic Development, that would fund ideas to battle poverty.