Resource round-up for August

August’s resource round-up carries the theme of awareness. The first is a story of a homeless man turned homeless advocate and his year-long endeavor to bring awareness to the untold stories of the homeless crisis in the US. The next is an organization thinking way outside the box with new and inventive ways to use Google’s free tools and their own ingenuity to bring much needed assistance to their constituency and awareness to their cause.


Bringing awareness to an untold story
Last August we told you about Mark Horvath, a former employee of the television industry who’d found himself homeless. At that time, he’d decided to take his background in television to the streets in order to give a voice to the homeless populations across the US. Now he’s compiled a number of video interviews with folks across the country and shared his own story about starting Invisible People.tv, his road trip and his hopes for the future.


Using Google’s free tools to generate awareness
Fly for MS, an organization raising global awareness about Multiple Sclerosis, is taking on a unique and powerful endeavor for the sake of their cause. They’re leaving New York City on August 30, 2010 aboard a small plane for a 60 day journey through 30 countries, where they’ll fly MS sufferers for treatment, specialists to treatment centers and share the joy of flight with MS sufferers. They’re using a host of free Google tools to achieve this mission including Google Analytics for managing visitors, Google Translate for communicating with people in the different countries they’re visiting, Google Checkout for accepting donations, Google Earth for navigating airports, and Google Webmaster Tools and AdWords for site design and marketing.

If you come across resources that would be useful to the greater non-profit community, feel free to post it to the appropriate topic in our discussion group so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, just click here and read through previous months' round-ups or search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.


Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team