TeamChildren successfully launches summer fundraising for youth development program

Having demonstrated their amazing expertise in transforming the digital divide, TeamChildren has been awarded a grant of $5,000 from the Drummey Children's Trust in East Falmouth, MA, and a $2,500 grant from the Edward A. & Catherine L. Lozick Foundation in Cleveland, OH. This helped start its summer fundraising drive to raise a total of $75,000 for its summer youth development program.

To raise the additional $67,500, Eric Bai, 19, a New York University rising sophomore, is doing an unpaid internship to spearhead this effort. He is reaching out for support to foundations, area executives and previous donors, more than 3,000 people that have donated equipment.

Last month, an anonymous Delaware County company donated more than 325 computers, expanding TeamChildren’s efforts to find more families, schools and organizations in need.

Each summer teen from around the region works or volunteers to help expand TeamChildren’s efforts of providing economically challenged families in the Philadelphia and the entire region with the technology tools and opportunities they need to be successful in school and at work.

When many teens are sleeping late or home playing video games on Saturdays, TeamChildren’s volunteers will be learning valuable skills that will serve them and their communities—skills like goal setting, teamwork, communication, leadership, and most importantly, transforming the growth and development of humanity. These teens are making a difference that matters.

TeamChildren is the single most successful program in the state that collects, refurbishes and distributes high quality, low cost computers to individuals and organizations that need them the most. It has distributed more than 11,000 computers reaching more than 50,000 children across the region, state and nation.

TeamChildren goes beyond just distributing computers. Each computer is loaded with extraordinarily effective learning software that will help anyone from baby to a senior citizen dramatically increase their cognitive skills. Brillkids.com, a Hong Kong based software company, and Awe Learning, a software company in Chester, PA, donated over $500,000 of learning software. Children and their families are spending more time together in the safety of their home learning, finding jobs, getting scholarships to college and moving forward.

TeamChildren’s volunteers will master the use of the learning software, learn about how poverty impacts the brain, research past computer recipients, and lead workshops for not only parents that have received our software, but also early childhood development teachers.

Each family TeamChildren helps has gone beyond their economic constraints to help their children receive a computer. They now have the world of information available at their fingertips and limitless opportunity to become a part of today’s digital global environment.