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George Floyd’s murder has deservedly sparked the flame of social unrest. Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,  and countless more cases known and unknown continue to highlight the systemic and institutional racism that American capitalism depends upon.

Our very participation in the systems that breed oppression make us complicit. Society must change. Lives are at stake.

A well-designed alert banner will quickly and reliably catch the attention of your visitors when an emergency is in progress and direct them to additional instructions, resources, and updates.

Working from home (aka telecommuting) can be great for productivity and employee happiness. But not everyone is used to it – or prepared to do it (and many have been forced to recently because of COVID-19). At Kalamuna, we work on a distributed team, which means that most of us already work from home – and some of us are also used to setting up temporary workstations while travelling. It’s not always easy (or ideal), but a few small adjustments can make a big difference. Here are some of our team’s top tips for working effectively from the homefront.

Let’s take a trip back to 1996. Bill Clinton was elected to his second term as president, and the Nintendo 64 was released in North America. People called the internet the World Wide Web and logged into AOL to check their email while tying up their phone line. There was not much else to do online, as Google, Twitter, and Facebook were not around yet (thanks Slate and Wikipedia for the time capsule info).

Continuing our long history of spending our swag budget for good, we planned to partner with the Baltimore Hunger Project (BHP) at The Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in Baltimore later this month. BHP provides 698 non-perishable bundles of food every Friday to combat the weekend “hunger gap” felt by food-insecure children in Baltimore.

As more and more companies liberate themselves from finding talent in a single geographical  location, the traditional office party could become a thing of the past. While I have had my fair share of awkward moments at office parties, they can also be critical components of building and maintaining company culture. 

Despite the political theatre and resulting uncertainty 2019 has brought us, I am overcome with gratitude for the relationships fostered by Kalamuna’s existence, and proud of the impact we have made together.

It’s easy to love nonprofits. They bridge the gap that exists between government and business, where the needs of our most vulnerable citizens are often met. They do the things that business and government cannot, or will not do. They’re a critical part of the infrastructure that meets our most pressing challenges and provide a home where our better angels can take action. 

Kalamuna team members Kristin Sartain and Sean Quigley took a moment to consider how nonprofits have impacted them personally:

Accessibility is really important to the team at Kalamuna. We strive to ensure that every website we work on is as accessible as possible, and that what we design and implement can be used, understood, and appreciated by people of all abilities. But keeping up with all the tools, techniques, and best practices, not to mention the latest WCAG guidelines, can be challenging. Fortunately, there’s a conference that takes place every year where we can do just that.

Like many of you, we are appalled by the inhumane cruelty leveled against migrants and refugees, and are especially heartbroken by the state-sponsored abuses enacted against children. BADCamp gave us an opportunity to utilize our sponsorship booth to create space to talk about this humanitarian crisis. We invited attendees at our booth to help us allocate $1,000 between three nonprofits advancing legal aid, humanitarian aid, or policy change on this issue.