I was reading a daily paper from my home country and saw that there were ‘impersonated” profiles on a popular social networking site for our current and two former Prime Ministers. Similarly, on Thursday, a local Boston news channel aired a story on how college recruiters and human recourse personnel sometimes conduct online search of candidates – to check out the ‘social behavior’ and ‘interests’ that don’t make their way onto resumes. [Hint, hint – you should probably remove those pics of your last trip to Vegas] These checks include viewing social networking sites, like the one that allows you to create ‘your space’.

Those two articles had me immediately thinking of this site. www.scidorchester.org. Long before I moved to Dorchester and started volunteering at SCI, I lived on sites such as www.idealist.org and www.takingitglobal.org. They were my connection to other people like me [my neighbors then weren’t exactly feeling the world peace thing]. People who feel they need to get their 10cents in about various issues – poverty, the environment and world peace –for starters , people who want to hear of workshops and trainings to advance their skills or get info out , people looking for scholarships, internships and jobs in the not for profit sector. The people who want to virtually travel to other places and lend support worldwide while they were restricted to home or school.

So, while I’ll continue to be members of those sites, and have another more high school- and college- friends- keep –in- touch- kind- of- page, that features pictures of vacations, new hair dos and significant others – don’t worry they are the ones HR people can view – I think I’ll also be spending much time on this one. Simply because www.scidorchester.org presents an opportunity for me to do all the world peace, save the environment type of work right here. The trainings, scholarships and jobs I’ll here about will most likely be within 50 miles of home or work. And I’ll cement my humanitarian efforts closer to home before taking on reforestation in Haiti,genocide in Africa and bauxite mining in the cockpit country, Jamaica. But most importantly I’ll get little houses each time I share info, post calendar events or tell you what I think! Yeah! building social capital…now if only I could trade it them in for airline miles! Tammyanka