By Amy Stokes | Founder, President and CEO
Net Buddies and YOU, our worldwide Infinite Family! Thanks to your generous December gifts, the LaunchPads were clean, connected, and ready for their return. Click here to see their first day and special message for our global Infinite Family.
Our Infinite Family created the first access to computers and the internet for teens growing up in South Africa’s Alexandra Township in 2007. Our LaunchPads were the only place students in the Realogile area could drop in, log on and learn in a safe environment -- and all for free! They still are!
We are ever grateful to you for your generous gifts in December and through all of last year. Keeping the LaunchPads clean, connected and ready to support independent and group learning is most intense at the end of the year when our main focus is supporting students during their exams. But that’s not the only time there’s a lot to keep up: the laptops need constant updates and trouble-shooting to continue working in the township’s “extreme” environment; daily attention is required to keep the backup batteries charged and ready to take over at any moment; and then there’s the ever-present African dust to keep at bay without running water to help.
It would be easy for Infinite Family’s sites to reflect waning attention in their appearance and standards amid the endless issues that arise. We fight letting this happen for so many reasons, but especially because it would send the message to African teens that our attention and investment in their futures might also be waning, that perhaps they aren’t important enough to keep our focus, that our care and concern too will soon shift to the next immediate crisis, as it has by so many others. These are messages our teens have received all of their lives from broken promises about decent sanitation and police protection to woefully under-resourced schools.
This is why your participation, as donors, in our Infinite Family is as critical as their relationships with their Video Mentors: Your ongoing decisions to continue supporting their extra-curricular effort to build better lives convinces them they have what it takes to succeed. Your investment to create a learning space like nowhere else around is the visible, tangible, external proof their hard work is truly important.
Thank you for again setting our Net Buddies' standards and expectations high as they start another school year strong.
Gratefully yours,
Amy
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By Amy Stokes | Founder, President and CEO
By Amy Stokes | Founder, President and CEO
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