If I have one passion in this world it’s kids. Well, libertarian philosophy and Austrian Economics are right up there of course but at the end of the day its kids. I suppose the desire to help kids comes from my upbringing as well as some of the events that have transpired during my adult life. I grew up in a home where my mom was always there and my dad was exactly the kind of father 2 boys needed. My parents took in foster kids and while as a child I probably didn’t appreciate the importance of that gesture I certainly do now. My parents have always been the type to help others whether it was bringing a child over from Belarus who had been exposed to radiation from Chernobyl and pretty much feeding their village for 10 years to volunteering at the Food Bank.

I was a Big Brother for a period of time in the mid 90′s which was a rewarding experience however I’m certain I would be far better at it now. My young daughters having gone through the death of their mother and learning to love and think of another woman as their mom has really clarified the importance of parents and a safe and stable home – although stable can be a relative term I guess. That’s enough history for now and on to my idea:

I’m an IT geek who lives in London, Ontario, and was thinking what a valuable experience it would be for underprivileged kids to be able to attend, at no cost, a computer camp for a week or so. The objectives as I see them would be as follows:

• To have the kids go through an interview process to attend the camp
• To require a dress code while attending the camp – hopefully some local businesses would donate to those that needed help in this area
• To teach the kids some software development fundamentals
• I don’t really want the camp to be about software but I want learning how to program to be the mechanism to achieve:
  • To meet new kids
  • To learn to present in front of others
  • To show them that professional dudes are people like everyone else
  • To understand how business works
  • To appreciate that they can truly make a difference

I’d need to organize the following logistics from what I can see:

1. Finding a place that would do it for free
2. Computers
3. People to help teach
4. Develop the curriculum
5. Food?
6. I’m sure there are a million other things

Clearly this is a very preliminary idea at this point so I thought I would try to leverage the power of Crowdsourcing to help me crystallize this into a truly meaningful experience for some kids that could really use a meaningful experience.

Sincerely,

Jason MacKenzie

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 10:19 am and is filed under IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.