Enjoy a Football Game, Send a Student to STEM/Robotics Camp!

As a busy summer winds to a close, students return to class, and football season gets underway, some of you might recall our commitment to offer a "no tuition" STEM/Robotics summer camp for inner city Oakland high school students. Unfortunately, our hoped for 2011 sponsorship for this exciting project fell through. It is such an important goal, however, that we are treating this as a temporary postponement, not as a cancellation. We now plan to offer the camp NEXT summer, with the same amazing partners all still "on board" (Oakland Military Academy, U.S.S. Hornet, NASA/Mars Society).

Meanwhile, we have learned about a promising fund-raising opportunity that could help make it possible: Tix Writeoff. Tix Writeoff helps nonprofits by working directly with major sports teams to arrange special ticket sales, whereby the nonprofit receives a donation for every ticket sold. So far, we are able to offer Oakland Raiders tickets at significantly discounted prices (a potential savings of $10-15 per ticket, with no processing fees). For each Raiders ticket, we receive $20. All proceeds, after processing and handling fees, will go into a fund to help support our Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics [STEM] outreach programs, particularly our Oakland Robotics/STEM Camp for inner city students, scheduled for August, 2012.

We hope you will consider supporting this important cause, by buying some tickets and enjoying a live football game or two! The season is just getting underway and already tickets for both the Jets and Patriots games are growing scarce. For full information and to order tickets, please visit this web site: https://tixwriteoff.com/. In the future, we expect to offer tickets for other seasonal sporting events as well. Most importantly, we can change lives with these programs, with your help.

We also wanted to suggest that our nonprofit and school colleagues check out Tix Writeoff for your own fund-raising needs; our experience so far with this company has been wonderful. It took one meeting to work out the details, and they were off and running selling tickets to help our cause. They are new and small but full of energy and commitment to help.

In closing, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Oakland Raiders for their generous programs to support nonprofits. We hope you enjoyed the "Battle of the Bay"! Recently we also enjoyed an ABC special showing how the FiRST Robotics Competitions are getting a leg up from the Black Eyed Peas and other music celebs. We are so delighted that sports teams and rock stars are trying to lend a hand to get our kids excited about learning! Let's all work together to make it happen!

We hope this school year is terrific for you!