UrbanMinistry.org Featured Case Study on CreativeCommons.org

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UrbanMinistry.org[1] is a website with over 70,000 items of Creative Commons licensed content to assist faith-based social service organization in bringing community change. This makes it the largest libraries of faith-based creative commons content on the Web (to our knowledge). UrbanMinistry.org is a part of the nonprofit TechMission, Inc.

Before founding TechMission, in 1996 Andrew Sears co-founded the Internet Telephony Consortium, a multi-million dollar research group at MIT which studied the social implications of the Internet. Through his research there, he saw the importance of addressing the “digital divide,” which separates those with access to and training in technology from those without.

Our vision is that UrbanMinistry.org would be a website where if Martin Luther King Jr. were around today and trying to equip a new movement online, this is the type of website he would want to build. Our dream is to imagine a world where…

…there are hundreds of millions of training articles, videos, podcast and resources freely available on every nonprofit and social change topic

…90% of media is user created and directly reflects the diversity of the world

…there are thousands of free college courses available online on every topic in nonprofit management

…every person is able to find the area of greatest need in the world where they can serve that matches their skills and interests.

To achieve that dream, over the next 10 years, the goal of UrbanMinistry.org is to use the Internet to deliver over $700 million in resources from the faith-based community to provide social services to under-resourced communities. This will include serving over 50 million web visitors, placing 1 million volunteers, provide 150,000 items of Creative Commons content for nonprofits, providing nonprofit college courses to over 6,500 students and funding 700 full-time interns. The end goal is that these increased resources would enable organizations to serve millions of more individuals in under-resourced communities, with hundreds of thousands of individuals participating in youth programs, being placed in jobs and college, receiving educational certification and participating in rehabilitation programs.