Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce joins World Community Grid… The next time you step away from your computer for a quick latte, your computer can get to work–doing calculations for AIDS research, genome comparisons for drug development or cures for cancer. In fact, your computer can do the calculations while you’re working on it at the same time. If you volunteer your PC or laptop’s unused time to World Community Grid (WCG), created by IBM, your computing power can join the thousands of individual computers already on the system to create massive computational power equal to a supercomputer. Because the work is split into countless tiny pieces and done simultaneously, research time shrinks from decades to months. The Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce has recently become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 325 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions. The Tucson Chamber is encouraging its business members to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid and then becoming a member of the Tucson Chamber team, appropriately called “Tucson Chamber.” “World Community Grid provides our busy members of the community with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Jack Camper, President of the Tucson Chamber. “We are asking individuals to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of the citizens of our communities.” Today, hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the globe are donating some of the time when their computers are on but not in use, and World Community Grid is harnessing this power to help advance promising humanitarian research projects. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world. You can start making a difference today. Please participate by first joining the World Community Grid; once you have joined, you can then become a member of team “Tucson Chamber” by clicking here.

Total Resource Campaign is off and running… The training is done, the campaign has kicked off and it appears to be off to a terrific start. By the end of the first day, the campaign had recorded nearly $30,000 of new money in sponsorships of Chamber events. The campaign’s chairs have set an aggressive goal of $500,000 of new revenue for the Chamber over this nine-week campaign.

TMCC Speaker’s Bureau is in full operation… The Business Education Partnership (BEP) volunteer members have become actively involved in speaking throughout Pima County school districts. These BEP business leaders volunteer to engage our students in subjects such as jobs skills, ethics, career skills and business life. One such BEP member is Donal Drayne, the Director of Catering at The Westin La Paloma Resort and Spa. Over the last several years, Drayne has been a guest speaker at numerous middle and high schools and has done a fabulous job talking with teenagers about life skills, work ethics and diverse cultural work issues. If you are interested in volunteering your time and knowledge to the BEP cause, please contact Cheryll Frazier (792-2250 ext. 133 or cfrazier@tucsonchamber.org).