June 19th was a day crammed with incident for nonprofit techies in Massachusetts.  Not only did we have the inaugural meeting of the Massachusetts Nonprofit Technology Working Group, but members of the Ethos Roundtable had the privilege of hearing from Norris Prevost about his proposal for E.One.Caribbean.

Here's the initiative's official mission:

The E.One.Carriban project seeks to connect the human, intellectual, and financial resources of the region and global Caribbean diaspora with Caribbean nonprofit organizations in order to help them address growing community needs.

Norris is both a Kennedy School of Government affiliate and a member of parliament in the Commonwealth of Dominica.  He has created this new nonprofit venture to maintain strong ties between Caribbean emigrants and their home communities, and to address pressing problems in the region.

Because E.One.Caribean has a strong agenda for developing online volunteerism, it seems to me that it has an amazing potential - not just for channeling the talents of socially responsible Caribbeans throughout the world, but as a pilot project that can work for many other immigrants and their home countries.

The Ethos Roundtable is sort of Cyber-Yenta heaven for me, in that I have an opportunity to see an entire group grow enthusiastic about a nonprofit technology initiative, with just about every attendee overwhelmed with a desire to offer the presenter a resource, an idea, or a contact.  (The group can also be a tough audience when the presentation's logic has conspicuous flaws.)  At Norris's request, we had an unprecedented follow-up; the following Saturday, several of us, including Ethos Roundtable co-convener Josh Shortlidge, met for brunch for another brainstorming session, which resulted in Josh creating a wiki to be devoted to the E.One.Caribbean project.

Norris has very graciously given permission for E.One.Caribbean's executive summary to be posted to the web, so I have attached it to this article.  For more information, you can reach him at norris.prevost (at) gmail (dot) com.




In the photos shown here, Norris Prevost is chatting with two Ethos Roundtable attendees: Eve Sullivan (executive director of the Parents Forum) and  Roxi de Lutz (a student at Northeastern University).