photo credit: www.marchofdimesph.com

This past weekend, we had another very successful Jail & Bail fund raiser for the March of Dimes! In total, over $174,000 in one day for healthy babies!

A huge thank you to everyone that donated, and for the continued support, and to everyone that came to Port Huron to help – including the Nerds – John Harbarenko, Nathan Wood, Peter Vankampen, Horatiu Baltat, Arthur and Melody Wiebe!

A special thanks goes out to Reid Armstrong for help on the website, and to Jason Quinn and John Lecik for organizing and executing everything to perfection!

We also held a 5 store Fill the Beetle to Feed the People during the Jail & Bail and FILLED all 5 to benefit the Hunter Hospitality House!
What an awesome display of our International Teamwork to help a small community! On behalf of Nerds On Site, the March of Dimes, and the town of Port Huron, we thank you all!!

If you didn’t get a chance to donate yesterday to the March of Dimes, you can still donate for the next week or so. The link is directly to the Nerds On Site team donation page.

image courtesy of the Port Huron Museum

The annual March of Dimes Jail and Bail is happening again on Saturday, Feb. 4. We are Streaming it live on marchofdimesph.com the whole day. Nerds On Site also has a Prisoner team for donations. Donations can also be made at the MarchofDimesph.com website.

In partnership with The March of Dimes, Nerds On Site will be conducting a “Fill The Beetle to Feed The People” food drive to benefit the Hunter Hospitality House in Port Huron. Parking their signature Red VW Beetles(NerdMobiles) outside the Super Walmart in Fort Gratiot, Sam’s Club in Port Huron Twp, Super K Mart in Port Huron Twp., and Kroger’s North and South locations, Nerds will be collecting non-perishable food items and donations to help The Hunter Hospitality House stock their shelves.

“Premature birth is the leading cause of newborn death and many lifelong disabilities,” the marchofdimesph.com website explains. “And it happens to more than half a million babies in the U.S. each year. Thank you for helping the March of Dimes find out what causes it and what can be done to prevent it.

One of the March of Dimes favorite events, Jail & Bail brings together community leaders and ordinary citizens for a common cause… fighting birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. Since its inception in 1957 here in Port Huron, more than 5 million citizens have volunteered their time in the name of fun – and a good cause.

At this event, volunteer “jailbirds” serve time in a “mock jail.” “Prisoners” are arraigned before a volunteer judge on trumped-up, outlandish charges, such as “reckless golf-cart driving.” They are then sentenced to spend an hour in “the slammer” to raise bail in the form of donations to the March of Dimes. Nearly 500 events are held annually across the country.”

Nerds On Site believes in supporting the community in which we live as a way of saying “thank-you” for making us your choice for corporate and residential computer IT services.

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Here is the type of activity this money will support.

When the Dragonfly Community Foundation started our work in Thailand, we knew people in many different parts of the country and had many places that we wanted to help out. Our home base of Khorat (Nakhon Ratchasima) is known as the gateway to the north-eastern region, an area where we’ve worked extensively, but somehow for the first few years of our operations we hardly had any projects running in our own city. We’re happy to say that this is changing, and not just because our bottoms are sore from all those long bus rides!

The work we’re doing close to home involves placing some volunteers in local schools, and also giving some free lessons to schools in our neighbourhood. We recently arranged an English camp fun day at a local school and our volunteer teachers in training and friends helped to convince the kids at Senanaukroh School that we foreigners aren’t so scary after all. This January we’re planning another local camp as well as a building project with a local school where we’ll teach the kids about mud building and sustainability and have them help us build their school a small natural study center and composting area. Other small-scale local projects have involved raising money for flood relief in October and selling Christmas cards for here on behalf of a small orphanage in another province.

With the world becoming ever more globally entwined, people are learning a lot about all the other parts of the world, but with a little free time and the right motivation, you can learn about your own too, while making it a better place to be.

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Here is the type of activity this money will support.

If you can speak English, with just a little bit of training you could teach it too! Dragonfly has been teaching English to Thai students for over six years, through fun English camps and volunteers placed at public schools and orphanages around the country. Just one volunteer can easily make a difference to hundreds of students by helping them learn this important global language and build an interest in the world at large.

Could you really make it as an English teacher? There’s a lot to know and learn, to be an effective teacher, but at the same time it’s easy to start. It’s a lot easier to teach through fun, games and activities than stale lectures. Students love to sing songs and compete against each other for the fun of it, and if they learn something along the way, great! Other students are dedicated and have a strong thirst that needs to be quenched. These students can gain a great benefit from having native English speakers around to listen to and chat with.

The Thai school term runs from May to February, and the DCF runs training programs and arranges volunteer placements twice each term. For information, visit our volunteering website: http://www.thai-dragonfly.com/.

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Contact our team (1-877-MY-NERDS) today to switch to Nerds On Site hosting!

Collecting for the Lethbridge Food Bank.

On this past Saturday I was privileged to join one of our local team in Lethbridge at a food drive at the Lethbridge SuperStore. This was an incredible team effort, with every Nerd in Lethbridge pitching in to help, running two locations at the SuperStore.

I want to send a HUGE shout out to the Lethbridge SuperStore, who donated an entire car load of groceries to get us started. Wow, what a caring team!

This year we’re starting a new program at the Dragonfly Community Foundation with some expert help from abroad. We’re pleased to have two engineers joining us from America to work in conjunction with a Thai assistant to prepare and run a seminar program to teach sustainability to local community groups here in Thailand. They will travel around the country giving seminars on sustainable building techniques, including cob and adobe (two different mud-building techniques) and bamboo design. They’ll not only teach how to handle materials and construct a building, they’ll also teach people how to do easy digital design and make simple engineering calculations for weight and load capabilities.

Sustainability is important in all facets of life, including both economics and environment. Buildings made from affordable materials and that can be made and repaired easily by owner-builders allow people to build without falling into debts which damage personal and community economies. Mud bricks are sturdy and low in embodied energy as they’re sun-dried, not kiln-fired. They can break down naturally back to the state from which they came and introduce no toxins into the environment. Bamboo, grass thatch, and other renewable resources keep mining for cement to a minimum and limit logging for building materials.

We hope this program will teach and inspire people all over the country to work towards sustainable living in Thailand.

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Contact our team (1-877-MY-NERDS) today to switch to Nerds On Site hosting!

The Dragonfly Community Foundation works to strengthen communities in Thailand through a holistic approach of education, health and wellness programs, local economic initiatives, environmental stewardship, and support for the disadvantaged. We give people tools and opportunities to make sustainable, long-term improvements to their communities and their own lives by promoting volunteerism and knowledge sharing for the benefit of all.

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Contact our team (1-877-MY-NERDS) today to switch to Nerds On Site hosting!

Who doesn’t love mud? You can squish your toes in it, mask your face with it, and even build your house with it. That’s what the Dragonfly Community Foundation aims to do here in Thailand, build people buildings out of mud bricks. This building technology is as old as dirt and just as cheap. It’s tough, sturdy, inexpensive, fast, and easy to do even for children. So far we’ve built at five different orphanages across Thailand, creating new spaces for the children and also involving them in the entire process so when the project is done, they can proudly say, “We built that!”

The adobe building season in Thailand coincides suspiciously with the dry season from November to May, and this season we’re looking at two or more projects to work on. One is at a poor school near our home base of Nakhon Ratchasima and the other is at a community for children and youth living with HIV and AIDS. At both of these sites, we’ll be teaching young people how to build with mud, which believe it or not is a great skill to have for the future. And they love it – getting dirty, being creative, and building something from the ground up. After all, who doesn’t love mud?

$10USD will be donated by Nerds On Site to the Dragon Fly Community Foundation for each hosting account sold during the month of December, 2010. Contact our team (1-877-MY-NERDS) today to switch to Nerds On Site hosting!