Job training centres in Argentina, books in Braille in Japan and a literacy laboratory in Anchorage, Alaska are among the projects in nine countries that will be subsidised by a special $1m fund cre-ated by IBM and announced this week. Recognising the importance of what it calls volunteerism and the value of encouraging these efforts, IBM held an in-house competition for new creative initiatives. Grants of cash and equipment ranging from $50,000 to $330,000 have been awarded for 11 projects, all which involve volunteer activity by IBM employees, retirees or their spouses. Other programmes picked from entries submitted by IBM locations around the world include ones from Brazil, Canada, France, West Germany, Pakistan and here in the UK. The projects were assessed on a variety of factors in-cluding objectives, target population, IBM employee involvement, innovation, likely results, and measurements to determine success. Issues covered in-clude job training for the disabled, unskilled and unemployed were volunteers will act as teachers, administrators and project managers. In France, in conjunction with Garches Hospital in Garches, funding goes towards temporary housing for the disabled equipped with IBM computers, used for data processing job training, and staffed with volunteers. Volunteers in Japan are involved in translating books from Japanese to Braille and the UK is involved with environmental matters. Software development to maintain a local community programmes database and to match volunteers to community needs is part of the project in Atlanta, Georgia. In San Francisco a hotline provides information on education volunteer opportunities in schools. Separately, IBM announced a grant of more than $1m in equipment and funds to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg in exchange for the results of the university’s research in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing. Under the terms of the three-year contract, IBM will supply eight advanced workstations and funding to the polytechnic’s mechanical engineering department for research in CAD/CAM application development and high-function graphics. The University was one of the original participants in a $40m IBM CAD/CAM grant made to 22 universities in the US in 1983.
