Carolyn Danckaert, 27
Peacebuilding program director,
American Friends Service Committee, Chicago
The American Friends Service Committee was founded by Quakers in 1917 to aid civilian victims in Europe during World War I. Today, the volunteer organization has a paid staff of about 500 in 46 offices in the U.S., with staff in 22 other countries.
The group’s current focus is “peace activism,” said Carolyn Danckaert, who runs what the group calls its peacebuilding program in Chicago. This includes organizing anti-war rallies and vigils as well as sending relief supplies to Iraq.
“I was hired explicitly to organize against the war,” she said. “But we also hold humanitarian aid drives and put together resources on conflicts around the world.”
On March 20, for example, her group will sponsor an anti-war rally at the Chicago Temple near Daley Plaza.
“There are a lot of individuals out there looking to create positive change, and one of the most important things we do is create opportunities for involvement for people,” Danckaert said.
And to do that, she relies heavily on technology.
Her group’s Web site (www .peacechicago .org) includes a detailed calendar of events and a volunteer form for visitors to fill out.
The calendar and much of the organization’s other information is being transitioned to a database called Ebase. It was designed specifically for non-profits by a fellow non-profit, Montana-based TechRocks.
Ebase uses the Filemaker Pro database program as a back-end. Ebase can be downloaded for free, or bundled with Filemaker Pro for about $150, at www.ebase.org.
Her team produces two electronic newsletters: a biweekly mailing called the Chicago Peace Alert, detailing the activities of the local group, and the weekly Chicago Peace Calendar, which includes area events from other local organizations.
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Danckaert manages her mailing lists of 8,000 and 4,000 subscribers, respectively, using a free list-server program called Mailman (available for download at www.mailman.com). This Web-based tool handles subscribe and unsubscribe requests, removes e-mail addresses that bounce back and automatically removes duplicate addresses.
Danckaert said such a reliance on technology is not common among non-profits.
“The non-profit community tends to be behind the ball, technically,” she said. “A lot of Chicago community organizations don’t even have Web sites.”
She added that a good resource for non-profits on all things technical is a site called TechSoup (www.techsoup.org). The most valuable of the site’s resources is an online store that provides non-profit companies with donated hardware and software at drastically reduced prices.
Overall, “technology has been indispensable in getting the word out,” Danckaert said. “I don’t know how we would function without it.”
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