Benetech :: About Benetech :: President's Update Archives

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

July 2003

I am positively delighted to share the latest Benetech news with you. We're growing (carefully!) in spite of a very difficult environment for nonprofits. The highlights of this letter are:

Benetech has strengthened its management team and board. Tom Rolander, a seasoned technologist and entrepreneur has joined us as VP and Chief Technical Officer. Chris Eyre, managing director at Legacy Venture, Silicon Valley's venture fund for philanthropy, just became our newest board member.
Fund raising success and expansion. Although Benetech's history is founded on our track record of generating our own capital from social enterprise, our goals for much greater impact require us to partner with imaginative philanthropists and foundations for certain initiatives, especially early-stage projects. We've been blessed with some exciting grants enabling us to implement more of our dreams for effective technology tools serving society.
The Severns Family Foundation has just funded the ALL-Link literacy project for young adults with severe disabilities. ALL-Link helps kids who have fallen through the cracks of the education system learn to read.
Bookshare.org and Martus, our latest two major projects, are both growing and doing well.
- Bookshare.org continues to expand and just won $25,000 in the Yale/Goldman Sachs Nonprofit Business Plan competition.
- Human rights groups from over thirty countries have downloaded Martus, and we'll be expanding our efforts on the ground in Asia, South America and Africa.
More great press and awards. The launch of our Martus project was covered with an excellent Associated Press article that appeared in many papers nationwide, as well as a great piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. News.com published an op-ed I wrote encouraging the tech community to think about wider social issues, especially in the areas of social enterprise and applications. This month I received the Francis J. Campbell Award at the American Library Association's annual meeting, for the advancement of library services for the blind. In September, I keynote a World Blind Union regional conference in Singapore.

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Building our Management Team and Board of Directors

Tom Rolander , a highly successful technologist and entrepreneur who has co-founded and sold several technology companies over the past twenty years, has joined us as CTO. I'm especially excited because Tom expands our senior management bandwidth, a critical requirement as Benetech increases the number of projects we are running. Edwin Ou has joined Benetech as our new Senior Project Manager, with the brief of helping us with funder relations and new project plan development. What's remarkable is that both Tom and Edwin served Benetech as full-time volunteers for more than six months each before becoming employees - an extraordinary level of commitment! Chris Eyre, an experienced venture capitalist and philanthropist, has joined our board and brings a wealth of knowledge and a commitment to social entrepreneurship. As one of the founders of Legacy Venture, Chris has helped raised more than $100 million of investment earmarked for philanthropy. We're excited about this connection between two of Silicon Valley's most innovative socially driven organizations: Legacy and Benetech.

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Capital Development

Benetech's hybrid model of technology entrepreneurship combined with the heart of nonprofit action is attracting a growing list of supporters from the philanthropy community. To date this year, we have been excited by our new partnerships with NEC Foundation of America, Aspiration, the Severns Family Foundation, Social Profit Network, the Community Technology Foundation of California, the Bernard A. Newcomb Foundation at the Peninsula Community Foundation and Google. As I write this letter, we've received breaking news - we have been awarded a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation for our Martus human rights project! What is particularly encouraging is the positive feedback on the Benetech approach from a wide range of foundations!

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Expansion

Though we have had fund raising success recently in the teeth of current trends, we are financially cautious. Rather than immediately expanding our regular staff, we are planning to take advantage of the current glut of incredible talent here in Northern California. We have had great luck with volunteers, but it's difficult for most people to work full-time for free. As a result, we're introducing a Benetech Fellows program this summer, through which business and technology professionals can join us for six to twelve months on specific Benetech technology projects and receive a financial stipend. While the stipend probably represents a sizable discount to what Fellows have been making, it provides income for the many professionals who are seriously considering a move into the nonprofit sector. This program also gives us the opportunity to "try before we buy," with the assumption that we will be able to hire select Fellows for regular positions at the end of their fellowship. Our first Fellow is Heather Ford, from South Africa's nonprofit technology community, who is a joint Benetech/Reuters Digital Vision Fellow.

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ALL-Link

Delivering literacy to teenagers and young adults with severe disabilities is the goal of the ALL-Link project, a joint effort between Benetech and the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Tom Rolander is taking responsibility for driving the project through to a prototype site with an enterprise plan based on our Bookshare.org subscription model. Thanks to the Severns family for backing this early stage development effort!

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Bookshare.org

Our user base and collection have been growing steadily at Bookshare.org. Our major expansion effort inside the U.S. is education. We have tremendous demand for book access for students with disabilities, and are pulling together a number of partnerships with different institutions to expand our collection and better serve students. For example, we just inked a memo of understanding with Indiana University, where we will receive close to two thousand books that they have scanned in the last couple of years. Through our joint efforts, Bookshare.org will serve hundreds of IU students and staff with disabilities. Our efforts to partner with educational institutions and better serve students have also been bolstered by grants from NEC Foundation of America and the Peninsula Community Foundation, both of which fund education-focused collection development and outreach to K-12 students. The low cost per book added to the Bookshare.org collection (less than $30 for an electronic book compared to over $3000 for traditional recorded audio books), also makes for great opportunities to serve communities that traditionally are ignored. Through a two-year grant from California's Community Technology Foundation, we will gear up a major effort to bring Spanish language books into the Bookshare.org collection. This project will also help us build the technology base for offering Bookshare.org in a variety of other languages.

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Martus

We have struck a chord with the human rights community with the release of Martus earlier this year. Marc Levine, our Senior Product Manager for Martus, has been traveling the globe training activists and handing out Martus CDs (contact me for a stock of these, or download it for free from www.martus.org). Human rights groups have a strong appetite for information technology, and our user-focused design approach is working well. Our successful roll-out in the Philippines with the Asia Foundation is leading to similar projects in the next year: we are expecting similar major efforts in Nepal and Cambodia, as well as several other countries in Africa and South America. With strong backing from the Asia Foundation, Aspiration and now MacArthur, Martus will have the much-needed resources to expand its impact!

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Conclusion

Benetech's current success rests firmly on our relationships with you, our community. We also recognize that our ongoing success will depend on your continuing input and support. So many of the partnerships have come about because of the connections you have made for us, and the positive views you hold of Benetech and our potential. We appreciate that and hope that you will call on us to do more. Thank you from the Benetech team!

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
Email: [email protected]