World ORT education charity supporting Jewish and... -
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Published on: 12/31/2008
Last Visited: 8/6/2009
"This is fantastic recognition from completely independent people," said Dr Sergey Gorinskiy, Deputy Director of the World ORT Representative Office for the CIS and Baltic States.
"That we were placed second to a Belgian agency specialising in entrepreneurship training serves to highlight just how impressive our community-based model is.
It's wonderful that Hewlett-Packard and its partners around the world appreciate that our approach is very good.
This is a great success which shows that we can be competitive with specialists in business education."
Dr Gorinskiy presented ORT's prize-winning project - Breaking the Digital Divide: Business and IT skills for Underserved Population Groups - at the conference.
"Of the several population groups which face particular problems in the Russian economy today, two became the target groups for our project: deaf and hard-of-hearing students and women, specifically in the technological sphere," he said.
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"Instead we sent our supporters, partners and contacts a letter telling them that they had helped us by funding this very special initiative to support young deaf people," Dr Gorinskiy said.
"As a charity, we decided it was ethically appropriate for us to resist the social pressure for corporate gifts and direct the money to where it is needed."
Also this month, HP awarded a grant to the ORT Mishpateinu secondary school in Kazan as part of its K-12 Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology project.
The money has been used to create a mobile multimedia computer laboratory comprising 10 laptops, software and associated equipment.
"The award was not given because it is an ORT school," said Dr Gorinskiy.
"But because of our close relationship with HP they know the equipment will be used well."
That relationship is one that the world's largest technology company - with a projected income next year of more than $125 billion - wants to expand.
"Hewlett-Packard has suggested opening 10 new centres under the ORT umbrella," said Dr Gorinskiy.
"We are looking into the feasibility of such a massive expansion with tremendous enthusiasm.