TENTH ANNUAL WEBRAISING EVENT LAUNCHES TWO NON-PROFITS INTO CYBERSPACE

Students and their faculty from The Art Institutes International Minnesota are volunteering their time developing two new Web sites for the Interdistrict Downtown and FAIR schools and plan to upload them during a WebRaising event.  WebRaising is based on the idea of an old-fashioned barnraising.  At no cost to the community organizations, the WebRaising teams combined their creative and technical expertise to build new Web sites for non-profit groups in their communities.

The WebRaising project at The Art Institutes International Minnesota is expected to go live on Saturday, May 16, 2009.  Local past beneficiaries of this program include the International Order of Police Women Conference and Homeless Against Homelessness. 

“WebRaising gives students and faculty an opportunity to give something back to the community,” says Dana Nybo, Academic Director for the Web Design & Interactive Media degree programs at The Art Institutes International Minnesota. “Young designers should have at least one community service piece in their portfolios. I encourage all students to take advantage of the opportunities provided by events like WebRaising.”   

This year’s beneficiary organizations are the The InterDistrict Downtown and the FAIR schools.  The schools are part of the Minneapolis Public Schools and eight neighboring districts and formed the West Metro Education Program (WMEP) in 1989. The schools are a result of unprecedented cooperation across district lines, imaginative educational conception, inventive curriculum planning and innovative architectural design.  The school reaches to the downtown community as a source of external labs, working with learning partners in the arts, government, business and other public and private sectors.