With the help of InterConnection's volunteers, Third World groups can gain a wider audience for their work
Monday, July 16, 2001, The Oregonian
By Steve Woodward of The Oregonian staff
For obscure community organizations in the Third World, a Web site can be a communications miracle -- a conduit to First World awareness, donations and volunteers. But it's a miracle available only to those with money and Internet expertise.
For those with neither, there's InterConnection.
The 2-year-old Eugene-based nonprofit business is a bustling virtual United Nations that operates out of the hearts, minds and spare time of four University of Oregon graduates.
Its avowed mission is nothing less than to close the digital divide between the developed and underdeveloped worlds.
Like better-known Oregon nonprofits Northwest Medical Teams and Mercy Corps International, InterConnection focuses on helping disadvantaged people in underdeveloped nations. But rather than flying in doctors, nurses and economic advisers, InterConnection uses the Internet to connect Web-design volunteers worldwide with needy organizations.
"I was struck by how the founders of IC could rally such widespread assistance to these countries without having to undertake the expense of widespread travel," said Duncan McDonald, a journalism professor and vice president for public affairs and development at the University of Oregon.
In time, InterConnection plans to expand its nascent programs for donating computer hardware and software to Third World organizations and for sending volunteers abroad to teach technology skills. Earlier this year, InterConnection arranged computer donations for groups in Chile and Costa Rica.
Volunteering virtually
The current heart of InterConnection is its Web site donation and Virtual Volunteer programs.
"Say you're a group of weavers in Peru," Charles Brennick, chairman and co-founder, said. "The only way you've had to sell is from a brochure. With a Web site, anybody in the world can find you."
So InterConnection turns to people such as Stephanie Westbrook, an expatriate U.S. computer programmer now running a Web design business in Rome and one of more than 100 InterConnection "virtual volunteers."
Westbrook built free Web sites for Alfareria Precolumbia, a group of women potters in a small Chilean village, and Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas, a Guatemalan center where Mayan women learn modern communications skills.
"I never get to meet the people I work with," she said in an e-mail interview, "but the appreciation they express via e-mail more than compensates for this."
Like InterConnection's three dozen other client organizations, the Westbrook-designed sites are maintained for free as extensions of the Oregon group's own Web site, www.interconnection.org. The total cost to InterConnection for its entire operation: $21 a month for a simple Internet account.
An after-hours passion
Brennick and Vice Chairman Jed Truett co-founded InterConnection in 1999, after meeting as master's degree students in community and regional planning at UO. The idea was born two years earlier, during Brennick's internship with an online travel magazine in Costa Rica, where he wrote articles and built Web sites for small-scale ecotourism businesses that draw travelers interested in a destination's natural environment.
Brennick and Truett brought in like-minded friends, Donovan Pacholl, a former Microsoft public relations staffer and UO journalism graduate, and Luci Longoria, a health educator and UO grad in sociology and psychology.
The four had developed a love of cultural diversity -- Brennick through his internship; Truett through extensive travels in Mexico, including a stint creating a set of economic-progress indicators for the city of Morelia in Michoacan state; Pacholl through a five-month backpacking trip through Europe, the Middle East and Africa, including time spent living with indigenous people; and Longoria, through 10 years of working and volunteering in nonprofit organizations.
Before long, they had created an online suite of services. The Travel Shop offers ecotourism information and destinations. The Artisan Center showcases crafts from Chile and Mexico. A Web-site roster provides links to 36 community, environmental and social justice organizations in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.
They did it while holding down day jobs -- Brennick as a planner for the Snohomish County Parks and Recreation Department in Everett, Wash.; Truett as an urban planner for the L. B. Olson and Associates engineering firm in Eugene; Pacholl as a public relations specialist with Maxwell PR Studio in Portland; and Longoria as an educator with the Oregon Health Division.
Web sites span globe
One of their first Web site recipients was the Chol-Chol Foundation for Human Development, a 30-year-old organization aimed at improving the lives of the rural Mapuche people of Chile. Giles Dawson, the foundation's assistant director, said the Web site has succeeded in keeping contributors up to date on activities, attracting international volunteers and drawing attention to the weavings, bags, belts and carpets made for sale by Mapuche artisans.
Other Web sites include:
• Amigos de El Pilar, a community group guided by California anthropologist Anabel Ford that is developing the ancient Maya city of El Pilar into a model ecological and archaeological destination straddling the border between Belize and Guatemala.
• Habitat for Humanity Belize, a Christian ministry that began building houses for the underprivileged in Belize City two years ago.
• Center for Sustainable Development Actions, which works to improve the lives of poor, disabled, oppressed women and girls in underdeveloped communities in Pakistan.
• Committee for the Promotion of Public Awareness and Development Studies, which promotes economic self-dependence for women and oppressed groups in Nepal.
Full speed ahead
As many as 50,000 other nonprofit organizations also may need help, according to studies cited by InterConnection. The grand plan is to serve as many as possible by employing a paid staff, expanding the volunteer pool, and beefing up the current $21-a-month budget with contributions, grants, consulting fees and commissions on hardware and software sales.
In the short term, InterConnection still relies on word of mouth to get the word out to organizations and volunteers.
"The amazing thing about this is that it's extremely popular," Brennick said of the Virtual Volunteer program. "We're at the point where we have more volunteers than projects."
Moreover, InterConnection's volunteers often go the extra mile for their clients. Yvonne Swain, an independent technology consultant in Chicago, for example, didn't stop at designing a Web site for the Lumen Sapientiae Initiative of Peru. Since the site went live, Swain stays in e-mail contact almost daily, offering advice and writing proposals for the group's small-business and worker-training programs for impoverished communities.
Swain, said Blasco Nunez, Lumen Sapientiae's executive director, "is the best present that our good Lord made us, through InterConnection."