Worlds Touch: A Charity Ball for Geeks?

In Greensboro, NC, there is an organization that trains handicapped people to refurbish donated computers and then turns around and gives those computers away to poor kids who couldn't otherwise afford them. What a great idea! Handy Capable Network is the name.

David, my board member with his finger in every pie in town, sent me an invitation to HCN's fund raiser that was to take place last night. I called Barbara Davis, the lady in charge of the org so I could get on her mailing list. Handy Capable Network might come in handy for the work I'll be doing at West End Ministries. They can set up computer centers, Barbara told me, and so that may be some cool partnership we can create.

Oh, by the way, Barbara said, can you do a booth on "Cool Free Software Tools" for our tech fair? She asked NetCorps, the OTHER nonprofit technical consultants in town, and they weren't able to do it. Great, says I. I've got piles of addresses for free online tools all over my filing system and it will be a great exercise for me to put the list altogether. I'll be there on Saturday night with bells on.

I worked steadily on it during the week and designed a one-page flier about Worlds Touch to go with the Cool Tools handout. I'll be putting the whole list up here later today, and I'd love to hear from anybody who has any other suggestions or ideas. In fact, the internet is just overflowing with free options for just about everything you want to do-- from office systems to fund raising to email systems to a funny little graphic to show your org's donations.

But who is going to show up on a Saturday night for a TECH FAIR? I put my materials together, donned my Worlds Touch t-shirt and drove over there. I must say, I was amazed. This turned out to be a funky, cool, fascinating kind of charity ball.

Around the walls of the room-- a medium-sized conference room-- were tables set up with little signs, letting the event's attendees "ask a geek" questions on various topics. There were folks with info on avoiding email spam, the Web Wizard (a dynamic lady with Professor McGonagal's velvet hat on) for web sites, a guy promoting the use of the Linux operating system, a blogger, a group that protects you from identity theft, an expert on RSS feeds, people selling televisions, somebody who knows about protecting kids from online porn. There were a couple of computer guys who make house calls to fix ailing computers.

In the middle of the room were a bunch of clients of HCN in the process of building a computer, one of them a fellow who is blind! There were a couple of islands filled with very tastefully arranged food-- wine, cheese, humous, crackers, and far too many pastries. There was a whole set of incredibly cute little MICE made out of chocolate cherries and Herseys kisses. Get it? Mice? Computers? Just too cute.

Then there were the fund raisers. Several baskets had been built with all kinds of new, donated goodies worth lots of money-- from coffee mugs with bags of coffee beans to gift certificates to restaurants or spas. You could buy tickets (12 for $10) and "vote" for the baskets you wanted by depositing your tickets in glass jars in front of the baskets. Gilda and I saw a whole church fund raiser once of just this kind of basket-of-goodies with ticket votes. At some point, they draw the winning ticket out of the jar and the person gets the basket.

You could also buy $5 tickets on the computer that was being built. I threw a twenty into THAT endeavor.

And there were the silent auction items as well. A woman who paints computer mice had donated a bunch of her beautifully decorated items to the auction and people went around bidding on paper for those.

Who came? Well, I got the impression that there is a whole group of people who support Barbara and her work with handicapped folks, and they came to support her and the work of HCN. Certainly there were families of clients of HCN. And people who just like a different kind of charity ball. It looked to me that an enormous amount of work went into the whole enterprise. In fact, so much that it boggles my mind entirely. I'm going to have to ask Barbara how she managed to pull the whole thing off.

I hope she made a bundle! I know I donated a twenty when she asked me to come do a booth, and then last night bought raffle tickets for the baskets and also for the computer. I figure about $50 in all. Since this is more than I usually contribute to causes, I'm pretty impressed with how much this cause and these folks got me to fork over.

Well, and it was fun. The room was well-lit and well-appointed, the geeks around the room friendly and interesting (to another geek like me, anyway), the handicapped folks made the event feel diverse and accepting, the food was yummlies, and the whole thing had the atmosphere of half-upscale, half-just-us-chickens.

The only thing missing was music. Hmmm. What kind of music would you bring in to a technology/ help-the-handy-handicapped charity ball?