Become involved!
Thank you for your interest in helping Learning Unlimited to succeed. We're a volunteer-driven organization, and most of our volunteers hold leadership positions. If you'd like some meaningful and interesting work with a young and talented team, then this may be a good fit for you.
You can take on a project below or suggest one of your own. To apply as a project leader, please contact us or fill out an application. Depending on the nature of the project, we may want to talk it over with you further, ask for a proposed timeline and project roadmap, or inquire about previous related experience.
Listed projects are current as of January 20, 2017.
Available Projects
Mentor a new chapter
If you have been involved in running Splash, volunteer to mentor a group of college students who are just starting up their own program.
Maintain a social media presence
LU now maintains a Facebook presence as well as a twitter. This project is to improve our social media presence by better advertising these outlets, improving their content. It requires a proactive person who will continually collect updates suitable for these media.
Researcher
It is important to our funders that we justify the importance of our work through statistics about the current state of education and through research about best educational practices. In this project, you would collect this information from journal articles and online sources, and develop expertise on the importance of motivation to students' learning.
Programming projects
The software we provide to chapters is open source. If you're interested in contributing to it, check out our ideas page from Google Summer of Code or our issues list, and consider taking on a project from there.
Design a new chapter website
Currently all new chapters use one of the three template sites developed locally by other chapters. We'd like to create a new template site design with easier navigation and better LU branding. This is good for anyone with graphic design skills or HTML/CSS background.
Thank-you notes
Donors to LU have put themselves forward to invest in our success. We believe in giving each a personal, handwritten response. For this ongoing project, we would provide you with thank-you notes to write and send as new donations come in.
Negotiate bulk discounts
LU manages to wield substantial purchasing power through its chapters. For this project, you would contact national vendors of products such as T-shirts and negotiate discounted rates.
Write grants
LU draws a large percentage of its funding from grants given by philantrophic foundations. Help our team write and revise grant proposals for new applications.
Analyze data
Where do students hear about LU programs, and what advertising methods are most effective? How many returning students are there at each LU program? How can we more accurately predict how many students will come following pre-registration? These are numerous other data analysis projects will help make LU programs more efficient, open more spaces in classes to students, and improve our reach.
Help write our annual report
Each year, we compile an update on all of LU's successes and challenges. The report gets wide distribution to funders, at our programs, and as an introduction to the organization. If you have experience in communications or copywriting, we would benefit from your expertise.
Develop chapter surveys
Help our chapters create better post-program surveys by developing good questions and writing guides on how to distribute surveys and get good response rates. If you have an interest but haven't done this kind of work before, we have some guides that we can share.
Data entry
LU frequently collects new e-mails for our mailing list, volunteer information, and other data that must be entered into our system. We would e-mail scanned copies of sign-up sheets to be entered into our software or a spreadsheet.
Create curriculum repository
Teachers across the LU network would benefit from access to each others' teaching materials. In this project, you would create and maintain an online repository of curricula. This is suitable for someone with a background in teaching or in IT, depending on the direction you'd like to take the work.
Maintain IT
LU maintains a website, blog, wiki (using Mediawiki), forum (using phpBB), a secure online file repository, CRM software, and more. We would welcome help in maintaining any or all of these.
Develop media packet
As LU programs garner more media attention, we would like to create a fact sheet for reporters to use and help chapters create their own fact sheets. Once the basic structure is ready, we also want to more aggressively solicit media attention through press releases or direct contacts.
Legal projects
Assist in drafting contracts (and studying the need for them), advise on liability issues, and provide other legal support as appropriate.
