Join our Xmas Donations Campaign!

14. Dezember 2018 · 3 Minuten Lesezeit

We've had a fantastic year here at Uplink — the size of our community more than doubled to almost 600 members, we hosted regular craft beer meetups in Berlin where we had the chance to meet many of our members in person, and we moved to a nicer office — just to name a few highlights of 2018.

A few weeks ago, we sat down and thought about how we could give something back to our community. Quickly we came to the conclusion that we wouldn't impress anyone with a small gadget or voucher — and let's be honest, it would probably end up in a drawer or trash bin anyway. So we thought "how about engaging our community to give something back to other worthy causes?"

After considering a few options, this is what we ended up with: we picked four non-profit organisations that we like (no time to make this a community decision as well, sorry!):

Rails Girls - a volunteer community with the goal of building "a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas."
ReDI School of Digital Integration - a digital school for tech-interested newcomers in Germany offering trainings and the chance to collaborate with the start-up and digital industry
Bowl of Compassion - a small non-profit organisation building and running schools and soup kitchens in poor villages in India
The Ocean Cleanup - an organisation developing "advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic."

Each member of our community gets 100 (virtual) cents, which they may distribute among these organisations. So for example, a member might give 20 cents to Rails Girls, 30 cents to the ReDI School, and 50 cents to Bowl of Compassion. After Christmas, once everybody has had the chance to participate, we will add up the allocated funds and donate the corresponding amount to each organisation.

It's an experiment and we are excited to see how (and if) it works and whether our members like it! If they do, we might make it a Christmas tradition. And if too few of them find the time to take part during these busy pre-Christmas days, we reserve the right to double the allocated amounts. :)

Merry Christmas everyone! Manuel & Henrik

Are you a Germany-based IT freelancer but not yet a member of the Uplink community? Do you want to get your own 100 (virtual) cents to allocate? Hurry up and join us!