AWS Public Sector Blog
Category: Nonprofit
Empowering girls with STEM education, safely and at scale
Boolean Girl is educating girls to code, build, invent, and animate. It provides enrichment classes, all-girl camps, special events, and partnerships, preparing girls everywhere to explore computer programming and engineering. Boolean Girl hosts its website on the cloud and is core to everything it does: telling its story, registering students and taking payment for camps and after-school clubs, processing donations, organizing events, building our email lists, and running its online university. Boolean Girl uses the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program to cover vital IT expenses while achieving its mission.
Five ways nonprofits can reduce the burden associated with fundraising activities
Nonprofits around the world should be able to concentrate on mission-critical activities such as fundraising, instead of focusing on managing their technology infrastructure. Without the burden of worrying about IT, nonprofits can focus on telling their unique stories to drive donations and engagement. Here are five ways that nonprofits can use AWS to accelerate their fundraising.
Enabling rapid COVID-19 and air pollution analysis across the globe with OpenAQ and AWS
Unravelling the relationship between COVID-19 and air pollution is vital for protecting public health. For example, preliminary works suggest that those living in environments with polluted air are significantly more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19. At the same time, air pollution is already known to cause an estimated one out of every eight deaths globally. The decrease in human activities due to COVID-19 lockdowns across the world has people wondering how air pollution levels are being impacted—and what valuable public health and policy lessons we can learn.
Coming soon: The AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Technology Competency
Last year, we launched the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency for Consulting Partners, recognizing top APN Advanced and Premier Consulting Partners with proven public sector success and deep technical proficiency. Building on these efforts, today we’re excited to pre-announce the launch of the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Technology Competency. Coming later this year, the expansion will include the addition of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) solutions that deliver APN Partner technology in the areas of emergency management operations, justice and public safety applications, infrastructure resilience and recovery, 911 and emergency communications, and public safety and disaster response data and analytics.
Capella uses space to bring you closer to Earth
Capella Space, a provider of on-demand Earth observation data via synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is going all-in on AWS. Capella runs its entire IT infrastructure on AWS to automate and scale its operations. AWS Ground Station makes it simple and cost effective for Capella to command and control its constellation and receive its satellite data directly into AWS using a fully managed network of antenna systems located around the world.
Now open: Announcing the 2020 AWS Imagine Grant
Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the 2020 AWS Imagine Grant. The AWS Imagine Grant is a public grant opportunity open to registered 501(c) nonprofit organizations in the United States who are using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
Bringing the power of play to hospitalized children
Hospitalization can be an isolating and stressful experience. This is especially true now, as the pandemic has led hospitals to impose even stricter visitation and distancing procedures. To help make kids’ stays a bit brighter, AWS is teaming up with GameChanger Charity to donate GameChanger’s patient engagement platform, Playwell, for one year to select hospitals across the U.S. We are starting with Seattle Children’s Hospital—a hospital that Taylor spent considerable time in during his battle with cancer—and will announce additional hospitals in the coming weeks and months. With this donation, we hope to bring entertainment and joy to anywhere from 75 to 200 kids per day per hospital.
Communicating a national flood risk assessment using AWS
The First Street Foundation is dedicated to communicating the flood and inundation risks posed by a changing environment, with an emphasis on allowing Americans to discover and understand those risks. By building awareness, our hope is that every individual is empowered to take steps to reduce their risk exposure to flooding, as well as that of their communities—today and in the future. First Street created a nationwide assessment of flood risk for the CONUS and DC, and is now sharing that assessment through Flood Factor™.
How two schools in Canada and Turkey competed through AWS DeepRacer to skill up on machine learning
Students from two secondary schools on opposite sides of the world used AWS DeepRacer to learn about machine learning (ML). Using AWS DeepRacer, students from a school in Vancouver, Canada and Instanbul, Turkey learned how to design, train, and deploy a model car using ML. These students competed on virtual racetracks against each other—all within the AWS Management Console.
Securing Amazon S3 Glacier with a customer-managed encryption key
Customer managed encryption keys are a common architecture requirement within highly regulated workloads. This post demonstrates how to satisfy this requirement within Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), including Amazon S3 Glacier. We also clarify some common points of confusion and demonstrate how objects can be uploaded directly to Amazon S3 Glacier via Amazon S3, which can help meet regulatory requirements as well as potentially save budget.