Non-Profit

This Thursday, Colin Copeland, CTO and Caktus Group Co-founder, will be co-presenting “Case Study from North Carolina: Identifying Racial Bias in Policing Practices” during the prestigious 2015 Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. This invite-only event joins technologists, activists, and officials ranging from mayors to White House officials to discuss technology’s role in civic participation.

We’re proud of our collaboration with Durham-based non-profit MDC to create the health insurance exchange alternative for North Carolina, NCGetCovered.org. The site was recently featured in the Herald-Sun. We’re excited to see our commitment to social good making an impact in our local community. Don’t forget the open enrollment deadline for health coverage is February 15th!

Our client social impact projects continue here at Caktus, with work presently being done in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and the US. But every quarter, we pause to consider the excellent nonprofits that our employees volunteer for and, new this quarter, that they have identified as having a substantive influence on their lives. The following list represents employee-nominated nonprofits which we are giving to in alphabetical order:

Caktus participates in social impact projects around the world, but we believe in starting local. We’re proud of the many ways in which our staff contribute to local organizations, each making the world around us just a little better. To further support our employees, Caktus asks employees to suggest donations every quarter. This quarter, we’re sending contributions to the following five non-profits:

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

[As part of the Fulbright Enrichment [From Lab to Market]{style=“font-style: italic;”} seminar, Caktus hosted 16 Fulbright students from around the world on Wednesday, May 29th. The participants were engineering and science students with an interest in Public Health and Mobile Health innovation.]{#docs-internal-guid–15dfdd3-f622-293e-da9c-340d4c5b5818}