Microsoft Unlimited Potential:

Enabling sustained social and economic opportunity in the United States and around the world.

“By 2010, we believe every job seeker, every displaced worker, and every individual in the U.S. workforce who wants a basic level of technology and computing skills will have access to the education and training they need to succeed in the knowledge economy.”

– Pamela Passman, Vice President Global Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Corporation

Over the past 25 years, the way work is done has changed dramatically. Information technology has connected people across borders and generations, and will provide opportunity for generations to come. By 2014 (in just seven years), an estimated 77% of all jobs in the United States will require a basic information and communications technology (ICT) skill set ¹. Yet despite this exponential growth in the adoption of new technology, there remains a digital divide. For more than five billion people around the world, the promise of ICT remains just out of reach. In the United States, there are 37 million people living in poverty and 30% of households without access to a computer or a mobile phone ².

It’s crucial that training and tools to enable broad utilization of information and communication technologies become readily available to more than the next generation of workers. The current workforce and senior citizens looking for opportunities to expand their skill sets need those opportunities. By including more people, across age groups and demographic profiles, we can pave new avenues of social and economic opportunity. Through partnerships in the public and private sectors along with grants, we’re helping ensure that technology educates, enables, connects, and provides more opportunities for more people regardless of ethnicity or social standing.

Microsoft Unlimited Potential aims to enable sustained social and economic opportunity for the next five billion people. Through Microsoft Unlimited Potential, we have created new business models and technology solutions as well as expanded our citizenship efforts in an integrated, global effort to address the diverse issues faced by those who currently receive little or no benefits from technology. By tackling this issue from both a business and citizenship perspective, we are confident we can reach more people with the technology and services they need in the most sustainable way.

The Microsoft Unlimited Potential-Community Technology Skills program focuses on broadening digital inclusion and helping global workforce development by transforming education and fostering local innovation to in turn create a continuous cycle of sustained social and economic growth for everyone.

The Community Technology Skills program concentrates its efforts in the following areas:

Community Learning and Digital Literacy Curriculum

Community Technology Centers (CTCs) and nonprofit community-based organizations have implemented a core curriculum developed with the help of Microsoft, offering courses at both the beginning and intermediate levels. With course materials now available in 21 languages, instructors around the world are delivering core competencies and instilling employable skills for the workforce of the 21st century. To increase the impact of community technology centers, Microsoft, International Development Research Centre in Canada, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, have created telecentre.org, a network that supports CTCs with the latest technology and opportunities, and gives them the reach to collaborate and share best practices the world over.

To view the curriculum, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/upcurriculum

To learn more about digital literacy, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/digitalliteracy

To learn more about telecentre.org, visit: http://www.telecentre.org

See how the Community Technology Skills program is making a difference in rural West Virginia:

Microsoft Unlimited Potential–Community Technology Skills Grants

Nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering hands-on IT skills training programs in their communities are benefiting from cash grants, software donations, a specialized curriculum, and technical expertise to better serve their communities. Joy Corporation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana through its JoyTech Community Technology Center has implemented document management and knowledge management training to provide computer literacy and entry-level information technology workforce skills. While the Capital Hill Computer Corner serves metropolitan D.C. through after school and summer programs as well as adult education and a G.E.D. program. Learn more about the people and programs putting Unlimited Potential Grants to work for their communities here.

Software Donations and Refurbished PCs

Skills learned on obsolete applications and hardware translates into little success for workers in community organizations or the modern marketplace. Information and communication technology software and hardware needs to be current and readily available. Microsoft, in conjunction with a nonprofit organization called TechSoup, helps nonprofits access software and technology know-how. Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) makes additional PCs, loaded with robust, current software, available to qualifying nonprofits”. The endgame is helping make the nonprofit sector more efficient and better able to serve their communities. In turn, they’re putting the latest business productivity and management tools in the hands of people whose future can depend on it. In Boston and Worchester, Massachusetts, Easter Seals, Inc. is giving disadvantaged youth and adults with disabilities new accessibility options built into Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, as well as memory upgrades, so they can enter or remain in the workforce from home. While in California, the Asian Pacific American League Center is installing a T1 phone line and implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (is this what you mean?), all to help deliver services to low-income members of their community.

Learn more about TechSoup at: http://www.techsoup.org/

Learn more about Microsoft Authorized Refurbishers at: http://www.techsoup.org/mar/

http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/citizenship/
giving/overview/UPrecipients/uscanada2007.mspx

See how kids in East Los Angeles are getting hands-on access to technology at the Oscar De La Hoya Center:

Many Rivers to Cross

Technology has created opportunities and transformed local economies. But that transformation will only continue if every person at every stage of their life, and from every social stratum, has access to information and communications technologies. Through guidance and training from CTCs around the world, grants in the form of funds, or software, curriculum, and hardware, Microsoft Unlimited Potential will continue to focus on the shift from a digitally divided world to one of digital inclusion. We believe in public and private partnerships because this goal is bigger than any one company. It is also a goal that represents the purest expression of the Microsoft mission: to enable people to realize their full potential.

Footnotes

¹ Norman Saunders, “employment Outlook 2004-2014: A Summary of BLS Projections” Monthly Labor Review Online, Nov. 2005.

² The poverty level is attributed to the 2005 US Census. The access statistic is from Forrester Research.