Atlas Corps Needs Your Help to Win America’s Giving Challenge

Last year, Atlas Corps won America’s Giving Challenge, and this year it’s in the running again — but it needs the support of people like you who care about service, crossing borders, and professional development for people dedicated to working in social impact careers from all over the world.

Atlas Corps, a year-long international service fellowship which sends U.S. residents abroad as well as brings foreign nationals to the United States to serve in nonprofits, is currently in sixth place in the overall competition that rewards the number of daily donors, not the total amount raised through the competition. Your daily donation of $10 can help Atlas Corps win, as it did last year.

See the standings — for today and “all-time” for this year’s competition — here.

America’s Giving Challenge, which takes place using the Facebook Causes platform, is co-sponsored by the Case Foundation, the W.G. Kellogg Foundation, and Parade Magazine, among other groups. According to the rules:

$50,000 will be awarded to the cause with the highest total number of unique daily donations over the 30 days of the Challenge. $25,000 will be awarded to the causes with the second and third highest total number of unique daily donations over the 30 days of the Challenge. $10,000 will be awarded to the next five causes with the highest total number of unique daily donations over the 30 days of the Challenge.

So far, over $1.3 million dollars has been donated to 7,600+ organizations, through the competition—by over 70,000 donors. Atlas Corps’s had nearly 2000 donors.

Last year Atlas Corps not only raised $33,000 through America’s Giving Challenge, but also won the $50,000 grand prize for having the most donors. The organization, headed by Scott Beale, went onto to win $20,000 from an online Ideablob competition. (Read more about these online contests here.)

I plan to donate daily this week because I believe that Atlas Corps’s mission of bringing nonprofit professionals from the Global South to serve in the U.S. nonprofit sector stands to strengthen our perspectives as well as help us discover new ways of solving problems. As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, I also admire Atlas Corps’s efforts to send mid-career U.S. nonprofit professionals overseas — people who have a great deal of targeted skills, and who already speak the host country language fluently and can jump into short-term, high-skill roles at partner organizations. Atlas Corps is completely privately funded, and has only recently emerged from its pilot phase.

Learn more about Atlas Corps:

• Check out its website
• Listen to this early 2009 podcast interview with founder Scott Beale
• Listen to a recent Nonprofit Career Month podcast episode featuring recently returned Atlas Corps Fellow Abby Flottemesch
• Check out this video from 2009-2010 Atlas Corps Fellow from Kenya Becky Gitonga:

And please consider donating to Atlas Corps as part of America’s Giving Challenge.

Site Visit: San Miguel School Gary Comer Campus in Chicago

Comer Staff greeting students as they enter the building

Jim Conti contributed this post — a visit to a site where  Inner City Teaching Corps (ICTC) of Chicago’s Volunteer Teaching Corps (VTC) members serve. Jim is the program’s Recruiting Coordinator and Associate Director.

For 18 years, the Inner-City Teaching Corps has placed highly excited and motivated recent college graduates in high-need, urban schools.  Though some schools have been partners for many years, the Inner-City Teaching Corps’s Volunteer Teaching Corps also searches out new placements for volunteer teachers.  One such partnership was established in 2007 and has had members of the Volunteer Teaching Corps ever since.  The character, identity, and make-up of the school are specific to this one placement, but the message and sense of hope are transferable to all other school placements.

San Miguel School – Gary Comer Campus is located on Chicago’s West-side, specifically within the Austin neighborhood.  The school and community are almost entirely African-American, with a small percentage of students and residents coming from a Hispanic background.  The neighborhood lies to the West of the Garfield Park and Humboldt Park neighborhoods, and to the East of Chicago’s first Western suburb, Oak Park.  For several years now, residents have been facing the loss of affordable housing as the surrounding neighborhoods continue to be re-gentrified and the identity of this proud neighborhood is transformed.