As I’ve “mentioned in the past”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/03/point-foundation-scholarships/, we are supporters of the Point Foundation, which provides “financial support, mentoring, leadership training and hope to meritorious students who are marginalized due to sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” They have a “Seattle event”:http://www.pointfoundation.org/seattle/ planned for 3/22 which should be a great gathering of folks. If you are inclined to support, please consider coming.
Tag: Charity
A large black velvet painting of John Scalzi and you, fighting space aliens WITH LASERS
“Available here”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/09/13/redshirts-auction-to-benefit-the-bradford-ohio-public-library/ if you feel like jumping into a charity auction. Tempting.
Point Foundation scholarships
A couple weeks ago I wrote about our scholarships for Marion County students. We started doing this maybe 10 years ago and are glad every day that we’ve made the investment. The students we’ve helped will certainly make a great contribution to Marion County, to Ohio, or to whatever community they end up in, and hopefully they too will extend a hand someday to help the next generation of students.
3-4 years back, we also were introduced to the Point Foundation, whose mission (in their own words) is to provide “financial support, mentoring, leadership training and hope to meritorious students who are marginalized due to sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” We became a supporter of their scholarship programs, and have continued to support ever since. We’ve heard personally from young kids who were cut off from family support because of their LGBT status, and these stories are just heartbreaking. Casting aside young people because of their orientation is terrible, and so we happily support any effort to give these kids a bit of help in the world. We can never make up for the loss of support from their family or community, but if our financial assistance helps them through some tough times, we feel great about it.
We have been fortunate financially and so we can reach out and help on the financial issues for young people. If you are also fortunate, we’d encourage you to reach out and help a group as well, whether it be kids in your community, or kids in an interest group you care about, or any other set of kids. And if you can’t help monetarily, well these young people need encouragement and mentoring and guidance and emotional support and everything else. Do what you can to help them get ahead.
OSU scholarships for Marion County residents
For about the 10th year now we are providing funding for scholarships for Marion County residents and Marion County high school graduates. We’ve used different mechanisms in the past, but for the last 5-6 years we’ve done this through the OSU financial aid office as need-based scholarships for Marion County residents or Marion Country high school graduates, any high school in the county, attending any OSU campus. If you know someone who is from the Marion area and wants to attend OSU and needs some help, make sure they ask about!
We have a deep and ongoing connection to the Marion area — we had great experiences growing up there. Much of our extended family still live there and we get back for an extended visit once a year. We are blessed with families who encouraged and supported us to get our educations, educations which have meant a lot to us. And we have fond memories of our time at The Ohio State University. So we want to support the community, the university, and the students who need some help.
And the students who have been awarded scholarships so far are just awesome. We met about 10 of the then-current students a couple years ago at an OSU tailgate and they were all so impressive. Big goals, hard working, youthful vigor — it was inspiring to be around them. Just having a lunch with these students was a huge lift for us.
We’ve never been very vocal about our support but in these times of economic challenge, we felt it was important to become a little more vocal. We hope that everyone does what they can to support and encourage the full development of our young students. Some of these young people will go on to create businesses and jobs, lead our communities, enrich our lives through their art, or otherwise make a great contribution to our lives. Having them sidelined because they can’t quite make the economics of college work out, or having them burdened with a mountain of student loan debt — neither of these seem like good outcomes. So we do what we can, and we hope and trust that others do as well.
College Charity Bowl
OK if you are going to give money to disaster relief this week, might as well make sure you participate in the College Charity Bowl. OSU currently lagging but I have just done my part to fix that so stay tuned.
Ignition Blog roundup
First a non-Ignition blog, but one that ought to be in all our aggregators:
* Mini Microsoft. A constant fountain of great stuff. Don’t just read the posts, dip into the comments too. Important to read not because of any MSFT obsession or any joy taken in MSFT gossip, but because we face Microsoft daily on the recruiting front and it is smart to know what people are talking about there.
Around ignition blogs, the jobster guys clearly are outposting everyone else:
* Jason with a job for someone affected by Katrina. The jobster guys have done a lot for Katrina victims, this is just one example. Here Phil talks about all the things they are doing.
* Phil on the Jobster technology stack. I wonder how decisions at other companies differ.
* Phil on hiring innovators and nurturing innovation.
* Phil on finding relevant blogs. He is right here — it is easy to find posts today but hard to find blogs on particular topics.
* Rich on tracking ferries via GPS. Love the ferry system.
Helping Hurricane Victims
I sure hope that all the bloggers, who have so much time and energy to blast the emergency preparedness and emergency response of our various levels of government, have spent just as much time and energy actually trying to help the victims of this disaster.
Kudos to everyone who has helped. We gave at the American Red Cross. CharityNavigator has some other ideas as well. I understand some refugees are coming to the northwest and we’ll look for ways to help them as well.
I don’t know how effective our government response has been and I personally don’t care to dig into that right now. First job is to help people. None of us should expect the government to solve the problem, that is not the way the world works.