Shoreh Elhami - GISCorps Co-Founder
Dear friends and supporters of GISCorps,
I am delighted to take the opportunity and use this blog to let you know about some of the latest GISCorps activities.
However, before I start, I would like to suggest that you visit the GISCorps website especially if you are unfamiliar with the program. The website is the best place to learn about our model and projects; past and present.
To those of you who are familiar with the GISCorps and have supported us all these years, thank you for your support and in case you’re also a volunteer, thanks for your selfless service!
As for the past year’s activities, we’ve had a very busy year and as in the past six years we’ll be talking about our missions at the Annual Conference in Anaheim (see details at the end of the blog).
One of our volunteers, Joe Forrest from N. Carolina, will share his experience in Thailand with us. Joe spent over two weeks teaching GIS to Burmese humanitarian aid workers in Mae-Sot and we are very excited that he is able to attend the conference. Members of the Core Committee will also talk about several of our other projects both those that were completed in the past 12 months and those that are still in progress.
I wanted to also share with you that out of over 1,600 registered volunteers, we have deployed 137 of them to 52 projects since 2004 and these volunteers have contributed over 7,200 hours to these projects. We would have loved to deploy so many more, however, we never seem to have as many projects as we have volunteers and that was one of the reasons behind expanding our work to K-12 area which has been quite successful so far.
We do need more projects however and we hope you can help. If you know of any projects or organizations in need of GIS-volunteer work of any kind (our volunteers have expertise in almost every GIS field), please direct them to us. We are very interested in working with them and putting more of our volunteers to work.
We also love to hear any other comments and suggestions that you might have to further our mission, so please don’t hesitate to share your ideas with us.
Hope to hear back from you in this blog and also looking forward to seeing you in Anaheim.
Shoreh Elhami
GISCorps Co-Founder
shoreh.elhami@gmail.com
Summary of our AC activities at the AC:
Wednesday September 30, 4 to 5 PM – Joe Forrest, a GISCorps volunteer who recently traveled to Thailand, will talk about his experience. GISCorps Core Committee members will also give an overview on 2008-2009 projects and activities.
GISCorps’ business meeting is held on Wednesday September 30th from 12:15 to 1:15 pm.
Thursday October 1st, 8:30 to 10 AM – GISCorps volunteers are recognized for their service at URISA’s Annual Breakfast Award Ceremony. Note: If you are a deployed GISCorps volunteer and plan to attend the Annual Conference, please let us know by sending an email to: info@giscorps.org.
