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Add a simple banner with Paypal link for our fundraiser (#570)
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Co-authored-by: Devin Ulibarri <[email protected]>
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pikurasa and Devin Ulibarri authored Dec 3, 2024
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion _includes/banner-mobile.html
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<body title="Donation ask.">
<div class="d-flex">
<p style="padding:10px 5% 0 5%;">Our goal is $25k this fall, and every contribution counts! Whether you give $3 or more, your tax-deductible donation will help us continue to provide a unique learning environment where youth can solve authentic tasks and learn by doing. <a href="https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S">Donate today!</a></p>
<p style="padding:10px 5% 0 5%;">Our goal is $25k this fall, and every contribution counts! Whether you give $3 or more, your tax-deductible donation will help us continue to provide a unique learning environment where youth can solve authentic tasks and learn by doing. <a href="sugarlabs.org/community/2024/12/03/help-SL-continue-to-transform-education/">Read more</a> about how we can make a difference together and <a href="https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S">donate today!</a></p>
</div>
41 changes: 20 additions & 21 deletions _includes/banner.html
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<body title="Donation ask.">
<div class="d-flex">
<p style="padding:10px 5% 0 5%;">Our goal is $25k this fall, and every contribution counts! Whether you give $3 or more, your tax-deductible donation will help us continue to provide a unique learning environment where youth can solve authentic tasks and learn by doing. <a href="https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S">Donate today!</a></p>
<!-- Paypal Start -->
<div id="donate-button-container">
<div id="donate-button"></div>
<script src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/donate/sdk/donate-sdk.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>
<script>
PayPal.Donation.Button({
env:'production',
hosted_button_id:'PTEFYZE5PUWNL',
image: {
src:'https://www.paypalobjects.com/images/Debit_Credit_APM.svg',
alt:'Donate with PayPal button',
title:'Donate to Sugar Labs today!',
}
}).render('#donate-button');
</script>
</div>
<!-- Paypal End -->
</div>
<div class="d-flex">
<p style="padding:10px 5% 0 5%;">Our goal is $25k this fall, and every contribution counts! Whether you give $3 or more, your tax-deductible donation will help us continue to provide a unique learning environment where youth can solve authentic tasks and learn by doing. <a href="sugarlabs.org/community/2024/12/03/help-SL-continue-to-transform-education/">Read more</a> about how we can make a difference together and <a href="https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S">donate today!</a></p>
<!-- Paypal Start -->
<div id="donate-button-container">
<div id="donate-button"></div>
<script src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/donate/sdk/donate-sdk.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>
<script>
PayPal.Donation.Button({
env:'production',
hosted_button_id:'PTEFYZE5PUWNL',
image: {
src:'https://www.paypalobjects.com/images/Debit_Credit_APM.svg',
alt:'Donate with PayPal button',
title:'Donate to Sugar Labs today!',
}
}).render('#donate-button');
</script>
</div>
<!-- Paypal End -->
</div>
190 changes: 190 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2024-12-03-help-SL-continue-to-transform-education.md
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---
layout: post
title: "Today, help Sugar Labs continue to transform education"
date: 2024-12-03
author: "Devin Ulibarri"
categories: community
---

**Shared recently on our [mailing list][0], Sugar Labs executive
director Devin Ulibarri shares his dreams for the organization and
how you can help us at this critical moment in our growth.**

[0]: https://buttondown.com/sugarlabs

Hello,

Sugar Labs is at a critical inflection point. We need your support to
leverage some important opportunities to grow. Consider [donating
to Sugar Labs][1] as we move into our next phase.

[1]: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S

![Image that has a picture of volunteers at a desk with computers, a
teacher in a class with everyone hands raised, and a teacher
overlooking two kids at their
computers.](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/209eca38-5697-4407-8d46-beb7ce2dc5cb.png?w=960&fit=max)=

I stepped into the executive director position in January of this
year. I did so because I believe in Sugar Labs’s mission to create
educational software and experiences for children. I also believe in
its approach, giving kids the *license* to learn, through
free/libre/open (FLO) source software, as well as the *means*
to learn through its community of learners and teachers working
together to create a fun, safe, and welcoming *learn-by-doing*
environment. Based on my own experience as an educator for more than
twenty years, I truly believe this organization has the potential to
be a positive, disruptive force in education.

Sugar Labs has a history that dates back almost two decades, with
methods (e.g. LOGO, constructionism, project-based learning) that date
back more than half a century. Yet, as an independent nonprofit, the
organization itself is basically a startup. Having left our former
umbrella organization Software Freedom Conservancy in 2020, we must
now take on the challenges inherent to growing our own
organization. This independence brings challenges, such as finding
stability and resilience. It also means, however, that we have an
opportunity to build the kind of organization that truly serves our
mission. I want to invite you to join us at this pivotal moment.

At the time of its founding more than sixteen years ago, Sugar Labs
ran exclusively on one platform, created for One Laptop Per Child
(OLPC), which was put into the hands of over three million children in
over thirty-five countries. Since that time, Sugar Labs has
strategically expanded its scope and renewed its relevance. One way
that we’ve accomplished this is by making the platform available on
more devices through Sugar on a Stick (SoaS), maintained as a Fedora
"Spin," and RaspberryPi (RPi) – the latter for which [we made notable
improvements over the summer][2]. We also created web-based
applications such as Turtle Blocks, Music Blocks, and Sugarizer, which
can run on any computer, regardless of operating system. Music Blocks,
in particular, has received recognition as an innovative tool for
exploring music and programming. Perhaps most notably, the Japanese
government provided two years of funding to create a version of Music
Blocks specifically to help Japan’s elementary school students learn
programming. Additionally, Music Blocks was also part of a large-scale
deployment of seven-hundred thousand tablets by the Peruvian Ministry
of Education.

[2]: https://youtu.be/EW0b5OkxXVs

This year I’ve spent time ensuring that our finances are stronger and
more transparent than ever before. I did this so that charitable
donations can be made with confidence, ultimately helping every
financial contribution we receive go further. I won’t go into all the
details here, but one thing I did is to update and publish our 990s to
our website. All of our tax filings are now up to date and published
on <https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/> under “Our 990 tax filings.” I
also helped Sugar Labs secure in-kind services that help our daily
operations at no cost to us. This year, we received Open Source
Credits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are helping us test and
develop new educational software; we received over one-hundred
terabytes of data storage through Google Workspace for nonprofits, and
we received other in-kind services that are helping us run our
organization more efficiently.

I also started a series of live events online where past and current
contributors and students have a platform to tell their stories, as
well as to invite guests from other organizations to discuss the
future of technology-in-education. I did this because, although Sugar
Labs’s impact is somewhat obvious to the many who are active in the
community, I’ve found that there are still many untold stories from
community members whose lives are impacted positively. As I’ve
continued to speak to members of the community and published their
stories, I’ve found that these previously untold stories continue to
affirm the important role Sugar Labs plays in education. For example,
in [one of my interviews Ibiam Chihurumnaya][3], Ibiam shares how the
Sugar Learning Platform and the Sugar community introduced him and his
classmates to programming from a young age and has given him skills he
continues to use to this very day.

[3]: https://youtu.be/JLsUiVzZ5Z0

As for our work this summer, Sugar Labs participated in our fourteenth
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to assist students to work on eleven
projects. This, combined with our first-ever participation in
Code4GovTech’s Dedicated Mentorship Program (DMP), advanced our
software development, mentoring a total of fourteen students who
worked an estimated five-thousand hours on projects spanning the gamut
from *Maintaining and Porting Twelve Activities to Flatpak,* to
creating new math games, to creating promising new generative-AI
services for both teachers and learners. To get a better sense of all
that we accomplished this summer, you are encouraged to watch the
*Finale* series of students’ presentations on our YouTube channel
<https://www.youtube.com/@SugarlabsOrg-EN>.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far this year. Yet, we know that
we can do even more. For example, in order to publicly deploy the five
generative-AI services we created this summer, we’ll need additional
computational resources. We understand that using resources on “AI”
may seem like a luxury at this point in time, but we’re persuaded that
gen-AI will remain as a mainstay technology, and we owe it to our
students to assist them in understanding and navigating this
technology in a way that empowers them. Plus, we’ve already created
prototypes, such as an assistant for lesson plan creation and a bot to
assist with learning the basics of programming in Python, that we have
found to be helpful for our students to learn and cultivate important
skills and new ways of looking at the world. Just as we did when we
created web-based software to run on any system or computer, we
understand that we’ll need to offer learning opportunities in gen-AI
in order to stay current and relevant in an ever-evolving
landscape. That said, we haven’t compromised on our fundamental
values. All of the services we created over the summer are licensed
under a FLO license, allowing for freedom and full transparency so
that learners can explore these systems at whatever level satisfies
their curiosity. And, of course, we design our software so that
students are empowered to create with these tools and build a
portfolio of their work.

All of these projects are exciting for us, and we hope that you’re
excited about them, too. However, in order to successfully implement
all these projects–plus the myriad grants that I’ve written, and
continue to write–*we must expand our capacity as an
organization*. And, in order to increase our capacity, we need to
raise funds to hire more staff.

I dream of the day that we have a team of at least ten staff dedicated
to assisting schools with their deployments and curricula, conducting
ongoing research on how our tools are being used, helping with ongoing
software maintenance, and running daily operations. Having these sorts
of resources would help us achieve learning outcomes for students and
their teachers. And it would also free up our volunteer community to
focus on what they love about Sugar Labs: working on innovative
projects under knowledgeable mentors to build and learn new skills.

We have set an initial goal for this fall of $25k to grow in our
second year of operations. Can you help us in this goal by
contributing $3 or more? Your tax-deductible contribution will help us
increase our capacity to continue to create innovative tools for
learning, together with teachers and learners.

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/donate" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="campaign_id" value="NEAV3YL4H6B5S" />
<input type="image" style="display:block; margin:0 auto" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donateCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" title="Donate to Sugar Labs today" alt="Donate with PayPal button" />
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" />
</form>

Donate today: <https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S>

We are hopeful for the future in large part because we’ve accomplished
so much in the past. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today
without the contributions of hundreds of supporters over the years,
both financial and volunteer efforts. We continue to be a unique,
positive community and a wonderful place where <strong>youth can solve
authentic tasks and learn by doing</strong>. Looking toward the next
three to five years, we want to amplify all the great things in our
community – mentorship, learning software, emphasis on problem solving
is welcome and encouraged. Your contribution can help us expand our
reach, and it can help us do so much more.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading this message and
thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Devin Ulibarri

Executive Director, Sugar Labs Inc.

P.S. Visit <https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/> to donate to, and
support, our mission today!

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