[PLUG-TALK] mentoring underserved youth in north portland, elsewhere

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri May 26 20:55:22 UTC 2006


Are you interested in working with poor kids with a technology bent?

Tuesday night I was at a meeting cosponsored by the BAEO (Black
Association for Educational Options) and Cascade Policy Insitute
About 100 people were there, a mix of parents and teachers, to hear
from the teacher who set up the Milwaukee School Choice program. 
I had another agenda.  One of the organizations I am busy with,
ORCNET, the Oregon IEEE Consultants Network, is looking at
bringing more engineering into the schools through mentoring
and classroom demos.  This meeting seemed like a good place to
find some opportunities.  After the presentation and the questions,
I stood up and said that I represented a half-dozen engineers
wishing to provide afterschool and summer mentoring activities
for the "nerd kids" in their community.

WHAM.  It was like I was giving away free popsicles in the Sahara
Desert.  I was mobbed with people with programs, each with a few
young technologists that they wanted help with.  I passed out a
bunch of business cards, and one fellow, Reg Bradley, wrote me
a two page email that night about MATI, the Media, Arts, and
Technology Institute, which works with under-served students at
Tubman Middle School.

Thursday night was the ORCNET meeting, and we had two speakers
from the NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers,
www.nsbe.org.  Edgar Massingale and Kayin Talton were looking
for technologists to go into schools and give talks, do small
classes, and mentor young folks.  NSBE works with kids from 5th
grade through college, to stimulate interest in younger kids, and
later helping students overcoming academic and social barriers.

There are many opportunities like that.  Some may be as simple
as setting up websites and mailing lists for these people, or
making connections to existing organizations like PLUG and
Free Geek.  Others opportunities might include helping teachers
to learn open source ideas, and passing knowledge to the kids
that way.  There are a lot of ways to participate, but there
are some grateful people out there, and a lot of helpful people
here - we should be able to make some great connections.

The speaker Tuesday night used an interesting analogy.  There
are the people that storm the Bastille,  there are the people
that hold their coats while they do it, and there are the people
that thank the people that hold the coats.  All contributions
help;  help as much as you can.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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