Interested in donating to a worthwhile cause, but want to know where your money’s going? Looking for that perfect wedding, birthday or holiday gift, but want to get something special? Is your school or class looking for a worthwhile social justice project? Sponsor a student from the Afghan-Canadian Community Center (ACCC) through our Adopt-a-Student Program!

For between $10 to $20 per month (depending on the student’s program), you can provide a scholarship to a specific student at the ACCC in Kandahar, whom you can learn about through their student profile. Your support will provide the life-changing gift of education to a student in need and help make a real and lasting difference in Afghanistan.

Adopt-a-Student also makes a great gift. Just let us know that you would like to receive a gift package, and we will prepare a package that includes a personalized letter from the Learning Foundation, a student profile, and information regarding the Afghan-Canadian Community Center and the Canadian International Learning Foundation. What’s more, all donations over $20 are eligible for tax receipts.

If your class or school is looking for a social justice project, adopting a student at the ACCC is the perfect place to start. Your students will be able to communicate with the Afghan students whose education they are helping to fund. This will give your students a new appreciation for their own education and inspire our students to repay your gift by making a lasting contribution to her community and the future of Afghanistan.

The education provided by the Afghan-Canadian Community Center has helped hundreds of students and graduates obtain valuable employment and each employed ACCC student provides economic support to seven members of their immediate and extended family. We need your help to offer this life-changing opportunity to students in Kandahar.

To Adopt-a-Student, please contact us by e-mail at adoptastudent@canilf.org or by phone at (613) 614-5349. 100% of all donations made via the Adopt a Student program go directly to funding scholarships at the ACCC.

]]> http://www.theafghanschool.org/2009/08/11/adopt-a-student/feed/ 56 http://www.theafghanschool.org/2008/07/28/afghan-school-project-starts-petition-requesting-support-from-international-donors/ http://www.theafghanschool.org/2008/07/28/afghan-school-project-starts-petition-requesting-support-from-international-donors/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:49:01 +0000 Afghan School Project http://www.theafghanschool.org/?p=97 The Afghan School Project has started a petition requesting financial support from large international donor bodies, such as the World Bank, the European Union, the United Nations, USAID, and others. This additional funding would be used by the Afghan-Canadian Community Center (ACCC) to hire additional teachers, install a solar power system, rent additional buses, purchase new computers, further improve our courses or even purchase our own facility.

To read and sign the petition, please click here. Signing the petition will only take a moment, and will go a long way to help raise awareness of our work. We also hope you will consider sharing our petition with your friends and associates. 

The petition is hosted by TakingITGlobal, a Toronto-based international non-profit organization that connects youth from around the world, providing them with a portal to find inspiration, access information and get involved in improving their local and global communities.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all of our supporters, who have helped make this possible. To put it simply, your donation will help change many lives for the better. As a result of your generosity, even more students will be able to receive valuable education that will help them get access to high-paying, long-term employment.

We would like to extend a special thank-you to the generous individual who helped us reach our goal in time. Your gift has touched the volunteers, staff and students who work to provide valuable education under difficult circumstances, and we want you to know how dearly we appreciate your help.

For those of you who are interested in ongoing donations, we have extended the ChipIn program (see below) to raise additional funds for furniture, textbooks and other essentials for the school. Further donations are needed to help us pay for rent, teachers’ salaries, electricity and fuel. If you would like to help, please click “ChipIn!” on the graph below.

If you have any questions about this or any other fundraising initiative, please contact staff@theafghanschool.org.

For every $200 we raise, we can effectively provide the ACCC with another computer that will help more students get access to valuable education and provide women in the Kandahar area with access to the Internet at no cost. Your donation will also be matched by a donation in equal value from the Cadmus Foundation.

To donate, please click on the link below. We’ll contact you via e-mail to arrange delivery of the card. Please write to us at staff@theafghanschool.org if you have any questions!

The Afghan School Project is on facebook.com both as a group and as an application. By joining the group, you can help us improve the quality of education at the Afghan-Canadian Community Center (ACCC), and allow us to promote our work without spending money on advertising. The application helps us to raise money for more computer equipment for the school.

To join the group, simply type “The Afghan School Project” into the search field in facebook, and request to join.  To add the application, please visit our facebook application page here. In order to join, you must first register for a facebook account. The amount of information that you wish to share with others on facebook is up to you, and you are not required to use your real name. We hope to see you there!

Roshan, the leading cellular service provider in Afghanistan, has generously agreed to donate the US$2,500 required to purchase new screens, keyboards and monitors. However, we still need help to raise the US$3,200 required to purchase 20 brand-new NComputing units.

These two fundraising initiatives, combined, will allow us to provide the equivalent of 20 new computers to our students. 100% of each donation will go directly to the project, and each donation will also be eligible for a matching donation from the Cadmus Foundation.

We urgently need your assistance to help our students get connected to valuable training – and the rest of the world – via computers and the Internet.

Please click on the link below to donate, and check back often to follow our progress!

To help fund the ACCC’s operating expenses or to suggest a project, please visit our Donate section.

I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to all of the students and supporters who have helped make our newly established facebook community a success. If you haven’t joined our facebook community, I would encourage you to do so. By joining the group, you can help us improve the quality of education at the ACCC, and allow us to promote our work without spending money on advertising.

In order to join, you must first register for a facebook account. The amount of information that you wish to share with others on facebook is up to you, and you are not required to use your real name. We hope to see you there!

Program Description

The Afghan-Canadian Community Center is seeking funding to provide training programs to government employees who use computers at government institutions in Kandahar. The program’s goal is to teach Afghan government staff successful and effective management skills. The employees will be trained by IT experts hired for the courses by the Afghan-Canadian Community Center.

The proposed training period is four months per course. It is our goal to run three training cycles during the twelve month period, once funding has been received.

Implementation

This program will provide computer literacy training to 40 trainees in Kandahar. Fifty percent of the students will be women. The trainees will be selected among candidates submitted by Provincial Government offices and local representatives of Government of Afghanistan (GoA) ministries and other stakeholders of the Afghan-Canadian Community Center.

Course Description

This course will introduce the use of Information and Communication Technologies in government institutions within fast changing IT environment. The employees will receive practical instruction in the use of MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Outlook).

They will also receive introductory and ‘on the job’ training in the operating system and its applications in a wireless network environment, which will help them to understand and use a computer effectively. Furthermore, they will have the chance to experience the different applications and usage of the Internet (Web browsing, HTML, FTP, blogs, e-mail, Macromedia Flash, Chat, VOIP) and will use these applications to reach their objectives in this and other courses.

From the very beginning, the students will work with virtual tools (Intranets, WebCast, Instant Messenger, Webmail), which will allow them to stay in contact with the lecturers at all times and prepare them for today’s work environment. These systems will be provided by the teachers. Whenever possible, the instructors will try to include other topics and integrate the newly learned techniques and their applications to other subjects.

Course Goals

Upon completion of the course, the employees will be expected to:

1. Understand the different software and hardware components of today’s ICT institutional & business environments.

2. Be able to create professional presentations, documents, reports, charts, calculations, simple desktop publishing and blogs using the appropriate software.

3. Analyse information and use the Internet for research and development purposes.

4. Understand how ICT can help today’s institutions and businesses support a global, virtual, immediate and knowledge-supporting work environment.

5. Feel comfortable and have fun with ICT!

Course Content

· Introduction to today’s role of Information and Communication Technologies within today’s institutional and economic environment.

· Setting up virtual work environment – Hotmail, MSN “buddies”, virtual office access, WebCast

· Microsoft Excel – Worksheet, calculations, and charts

· Microsoft PowerPoint – Presentations

· Microsoft Word – Word and Document processing

· Internet Explorer and its applications – Mail, search engines, HTML, WebBlog

· Collaboration tools – Web Collaborator, Skype, Webcast, Chat and others

· Chat and Instant Messenger

· WebCast with Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

Teaching and Learning Strategies

The entire course will be presented via lectures. The employees will be encouraged to participate in classroom training. The instructor will act as a guide to help the students acquire knowledge and experience through practical experience and by investigating the use of the latest ICT tools and applications. The emphasis is not on memorizing technical terms but rather on learning how to search and analyse information to achieve objectives in a professional manner. There will be used real-life examples and the latest Internet tools available to prepare the employees for their future virtual, digital, immediate, knowledge-based, and innovative working environment.

Unique Features of this Training

By streamlining communications between the provincial government and its departments with the central government, this program directly promotes the institutional development and capacity-building of the public sector. It will also contribute to a qualitative improvement in the administrative services offered at the provincial level, which in turn, will enhance local governance and the expansion and promotion of legal economic activities.

Although this program’s contribution to business development seems modest in the short term, it will be vast in the mid and long term due to the impact it will have on the promotion of new businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities at the regional level. It is also gender sensitive and will open new windows of opportunities for women in the region.

A strong, efficient, qualified and motivated public administration is an asset for the Afghan Canadian Community Center’s activities in Kandahar. This type of training will have a significant contribution to the development of human capital at the regional level. The emphasis of the Government Institutional Capacity Building Program on capacity-building activities will help improve the legal and regulatory governance at the provincial level.

Program Requirements

2 trainers (1 male and 1 female teacher)

Monthly salary: US$ 300.00 each for a total of US$2,400.00 per course.

Total cost of this Donor Request is US$600.00 a month, for a total of US$2,400.00 for a four month course.

These requests will offer several ways for donors to support the school’s aims, and will allow you to choose a method of support that best matches your interests and financial situation. This will also allow you to see the results of your generosity as the projects progress.

Described below is the first such donor request, as prepared by Ehsan:

Independent Internet Facility for Women in Kandahar at the Afghan-Canadian Community Center

A historical initiative towards enhancing the independence, education and development of women in Kandahar.

Program Description

The goal of this project is to empower women in Kandahar by facilitating their exposure to knowledge and information via the Internet as a means of enhancing their effectiveness and productivity in their communities.

The Internet has already established itself in the world as being one of the most popular and fastest growing sources of up-to-date general and research information. Accessing Internet services as a tool to improve and enrich women’s knowledge and education is unique. Business activities, communication and cross-cultural understanding will all be enhanced by increased Internet exposure. Openness to the outside world in the commercial and communal activities of women in Kandahar will be improved as a result of access to the Internet in a secure and supportive environment.

People of this region in general and women in particular are in great need of improved access to knowledge and information. Open access to information will assist people in bringing stability in the area and help in the improvement of people’s attitudes towards the government and international community. Access to this information will encourage peaceful behavior, and will promote cross-cultural understanding and co-existence.

E-commerce is well established in advanced countries and businesses already understand the need for a presence on the internet as an efficient means of attracting customers and promoting their businesses actively 24 hours per day.

Public information centers can play an important role in this context for the spread of information promoting peaceful, long-term solutions to problems.

Total cost of this donor request is CAN$350.00 (US$300) a month, at an annual cost of CAN$4200 (US$3600.00).

-Ehsan

In the case of this particular donor request, funding has been provided by an anonymous donor to allow this program to begin operations for the first six months. Additional contributions will extend the life of the program.

Donor requests will reflect the specific costs of the particular project, as well as the associated costs of operating the ACCC in support of that project. As an example, if a program will run for 4 hours a day, and the ACCC is open a total of 16 hours a day, the project will include 25% of the ACCC’s monthly costs for the duration of the program. Specific costs may include additional teachers, textbooks and course material, as examples.

We are committed to making the most of our donors’ contributions. Unless otherwise indicated, no portion of your donation will be used to finance fundraising, advertising or administrative overhead.