OT? volunteer opportunities at Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity

[Peter Dobratz]

I am writing to solicit volunteers for Greater Nashua Habitat for
Humanity.  Perhaps this could go to gnhlug-jobs, but we are an
all-volunteer organization and most of our volunteers have full-time
jobs that keep them busy for most of the week.

What is Habitat for Humanity?
We are a non-profit organization with the fundamental goal of
eliminating substandard housing throughout the world.  In southern New
Hampshire, we focus on providing affordable home-ownership
opportunities to area families.  Typically the people we help are
living in an apartment that is too small or living with their extended
families to make ends meet.  A selected family will have to spend at
least 350 hours volunteering with us, typically helping to build their
own house.  We do also pass on the cost of construction materials to
the homeowner and we setup a zero interest mortgage.  The mortgage
payment is typically around $400/month, and then the homeowners still
have to pay standard utilities and property taxes.  We use a
combination of donations and repayment of construction materials to
fund future construction project and support the day-to-day overhead
of running the organization.

Personally, I am a software engineer and I have been involved with our
technology committee for about 5 years.  We have 2 small office spaces
donated to us in downtown Nashua and most of our computers are
donations from local individuals or companies.  We recently moved our
website ( http://www.nashabitat.org/ ) from a host running Windows/IIS
to one that runs Linux/Apache.  We wanted to move to the WordPress
framework to enable us to more quickly get information updated, and it
turned out to be more hassle than it was worth to get it to work with
IIS and our existing host.  Though you might think that non-profits
would be all about free (as in beer) software, but in actuality we
just want to get things done.  That being said, we are open to running
whatever our volunteers are enthusiastic about supporting.  We try to
keep our overhead costs down so that as much of our donations as
possible go to fulfilling our mission.

Here are some of the current things that we do and could potentially
use help with:

- administering two small office networks with wireless networks
(current ISP is Fairpoint; DSL)
- managing technical aspects of our website (currently WordPress with
its themes and plugins)
- supporting registration activities for our main yearly fundraiser
"Take a Hike for Humanity" (May 30-31, 2009).
- figuring out a way to share our photo collection online
- email mailing lists for volunteer coordination (we've got a Yahoo
group; for @nashabitat.org emails we use google apps)
- managing software on office PCs (we've got donated copies of Windows
XP, MS Office Pro 2003, and Quickbooks)
- automating backups from our main office PC to another PC (we've
currently got an older PC running Xubuntu with a 320 GB hard drive in
it)
- maintain the volunteer database (currently an unmaintained Access DB
that is used only to generate mailing labels for our quarterly
newsletter)
- selling surplus computer parts and donated construction materials on ebay

If you're interested in helping out or want to learn more about what
we do, email me off-list:
peter.dobratz at nashabitat.org

Thanks,
Peter