Non-Profit Work is good for the IT soul!

I am doing some work for this non-profit called Her Story Writers, A Community Memoir Writing Project for Women, www.herstorywriters.org/ . They provide a forum for women to tell their stories. Good and bad. To read some of the stories on this site will tug on the strings of your heart! And the people that volunteer for this non-profit and the women who I have met that write for it are wonderful people indeed!

I came upon this non-profit while attending the Greater Middle Country Chamber of Commerce meeting last month that is held at the Centereach Library. There I met someone from the Miller Business Center, which is a fantastic resource provided by the library. She had attended the Chamber of Commerce meeting and afterwards we spoke. She asked if I would be interested in doing some non-paid work for a non-profit.

Well in these days of everyone looking out for themselves, I pride myself on making time for those who don’t have.

And I have to tell you, not only does it feel good to do work for those who do good for others, but I find that I am exposed to new technologies this way. I learn new ways of doing the same thing. New experiences in troubleshooting PC and application issues.

Case in point, this non-profit uses Quickbooks which I only have a summary knowledge of. The director wants to create a custom thank you letter template to say thank you to all the people that donate to the non-profit. I spent about 2 hours with her learning what she wanted to do, how she was doing it in the past and how Quickbooks worked. I found that someone else had created a new thank you letter template, but over time the director wanted to add more information from the database when merging them.

I was very happy when I was able to connect the dots for both her and myself and create the template she needed. Now, I have to create a few more templates so that she doesn’t have to customize anything, she can just point click and print! 

The people at this non-profit are so genuinely happy that I am there to help them. They all volunteer their time, so I know that my part in the puzzle is to make sure that when they are there doing their ‘thing’ that they can do it without any problems from those old dinasaurs that they call computers!

 It is a good feeling! And I think if more IT people, heck! if more PEOPLE volunteered their time, they would discover that the feelings you get back from it are more than worth the time spent! Besides,,, what are you going to do with those spare hours anyway? Watch TV? Play solitare on the computer?