Epic Change is very close to winning $10,000 from Ideablob, a national business idea competition, to build a technology lab at our locally-led partner school in Arusha, Tanzania.  Voting ends today at 11:59:59 pm CST on http://bit.ly/ideablob and our lead is now just 25 votes.  If you haven’t voted and asked your friends, family & colleagues to do the same, now is the time.  Need info to share?  Here’s the skinny:

We Could Win $10K to Build a Technology Lab in Tanzania

We plan to use those funds to create a technology lab at the school in Tanzania so that children, teachers and parents in the community can learn new skills, access a whole new world of information and enter global conversations by using social media to share their stories online.  VOTE NOW.

Teachers, Children & Parents are Lined Up to Vote…

Local school founder “Mama Lucy” Kamptoni wrote a note earlier this week with some photos and this note to update us on their efforts to rally the vote in Tanzania:

Stacey,

I hope everything is well with you. The parents, teachers, students, friends and the community around the school are so excited with voting for Epic Change as they know what you are trying to do is for the benefit of their community.

Everyone wants to vote, but here the network is mostly very slow, so they are spending much time waiting on the queue / line to vote. But many are voting.

I’ve attached few photos of children and others while voting. The pupils are saying this is only their chance to have Technology Lab, so they don’t want to lose ;) Hope their dream will come to be true!

Wish you good luck!

Mama Lucy

Technology in Arusha is so incredibly limited that they need our votes to amplify their voices.  In our country, it’s so simple to click a few buttons.  In theirs, they have to secure transport to an internet cafe, pay for web access, hope the spotty power grid is working, and use connections that are effectively at dial-up speeds to access heavy websites created primarily for Western audiences. Many haven’t used the internet before; most didn’t have email accounts; English is a second language.  So they’re lining up to vote at local internet cafes, but it can take hours. To read more about what’s going on in Tanzania, click here.

For us it takes just a couple of minutes, and a couple of clicks: VOTE NOW.

Imagine what an incredible introduction to the social media community it would be for them to win the funds to build their own technology lab by working hard making their voices heard online.

About Us

Epic Change is a 501c3 nonprofit that helps global grassroots changemakers share their “epic” stories in ways that generate the income they need to create “change” in their communities.  To date on our project in Arusha, we’ve invested over $65,000 which has been used to secure land, build 5 new classrooms and purchase a refurbished school bus for a school that now serves over 300 children.  As a direct result of our investment, our local partner Mama Lucy Kamptoni has built a school whose students recently ranked #1 out of 117 schools on national exams – in the very first year their school was certified to participate.

Epic Change is also the creator of TweetsGiving, one of Twitter’s earliest social fundraisers, which raised over $10,000 in just 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania where Twitter handles are now painted on the walls.  Our work has been covered in hundreds of online publications including Mashable, The NonProfit Times, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and Ode Magazine.  Learn more at http://www.EpicChange.org.