By Travis Reiman, Dean of Students at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! for Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to classroom teachers in Hillsboro by delivering purple flowers and gift cards for Valentine’s Day arts and crafts projects. Here’s an account from their Dean of Students.

Last Thursday, the classroom teachers here at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR got a special surpise. As vases of beautiful purple flowers were delivered, there were plenty of smiles and lots of confused looks. Is my husband just trying to be sweet??? Did I finally win the lottery??? No one has ever sent me flowers before!!!

Everyone was shocked and excited when they discovered they were the beneficiaries of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness Program. In addition to the bouquets, all 19 classroom teachers received $100  gift cards. The gift cards were meant to be used for the school’s Valentine’s Day celebrations so that students could have an extra special day.

This special gift was a great reward for all the hard work and effort W.L. Henry’s students put into learning this year. For the teachers, this opportunity to give their students an afternoon of special arts and crafts projects, candy, gifts, and fun put huge smiles on their faces. Thanks so much, Yahoo!.

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! For Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In October, inspired by mandatory composting laws in San Francisco, we partnered with Urban Sprouts to build compost systems in schools and to promote composting at home with students and their families.  Here’s an account from their Executive Director.

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Every week, Urban Sprouts’ Garden Educators visit seven different public middle and high schools in San Francisco, to teach students to build their own school gardens. Urban Sprouts helps youth grow their own fresh and healthy food right at school, while learning about healthy living, cooking, science skills, and protecting the environment.

Each day, when young people harvest potatoes they grew and turn them into French fries, or carefully weed around baby plants they grew from seed, these students change the way they feel about what foods they eat and what toxins their lifestyles contribute to our natural environment.

One major way students in San Francisco can keep the environment clean is by helping reach our city’s goal of recycling or composting 100% of the waste we produce, keeping it all out of landfills. Students in Urban Sprouts’ programs have said, “I learned how to use the compost bin and about how everything affects our earth. I want to make sure we reduce, reuse, and recycle,” and “I have already started to teach my family and friends.”

Now, San Francisco has passed a law requiring separation of compostable waste at home for curbside pick up, using kitchen pails and green garbage cans. Our friends at Yahoo! have generously funded our entire project to help students promote home composting among their peers and families.

Over 700 students at seven schools will participate, building complete compost education stations open to the public at their schools, and creating school-wide peer education campaigns to educate their schools on how to use their green garbage cans at home. Urban Sprouts students will build demonstration compost systems and worm bins, create short videos, and hand out kitchen pail liner bags as part of the campaign.

With help from Yahoo! and San Francisco’s youth, we can reach our city’s goal of Zero Waste!

Abby Jaramillo
Executive Director
Urban Sprouts

Victor Tsaran is one of those people who just impresses the hell out of you. He grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage and is now a talented computer engineer in the U.S. He’s an accomplished musician and songwriter. And he also happens to be blind.

Victor runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program. He helps make it easy for people with all kinds of disabilities to use our sites. When I first met Victor, I had the same naïve reaction most people have – dumbfounded by how he could crank open his laptop and be fully self-sufficient reading email and surfing the web. That’s because I was clueless about all the remarkable ways that people with disabilities use technology.

Victor’s made it his mission to educate our designers and engineers, helping change their assumptions that accessibility somehow requires sacrifice or compromise. On the contrary, Victor argues that accessible design is better for everyone. Just as curb-cuts were designed for wheelchairs, they’re also a great convenience for strollers, luggage and shopping carts, right?

But driving the point home sometimes means making someone walk a mile in his moccasins. Enter the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, which has been toured by more than 75 product teams to date. It’s filled with a wide array of assistive technologies – screen readers, onscreen keyboards, interactive Braille displays, etc. When Yahoos arrive, they’re told they’ve just had a stroke and can’t type with their fingers. They’re given a rubber ball and asked to type their name. Um… Next, they’re fully paralyzed. “OK, try to send an email.” Uh… After they’re introduced to the technology solutions, they watch videos of disabled people in action.

All this leaves developers making accessibility a goal before they write their first line of code. It’s why anybody can access rich features and tools on products like Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. It’s why third-party websites that are inaccessible in their own right are now entirely accessible via the new “favorites” area on the Yahoo! Homepage. Victor has helped Yahoo! make enormous strides since joining us four years ago, but there’s still more to come.

We spent some time following Victor with a video camera to not only understand his work, but to appreciate his daily experience. Commuting by train. Playing guitar. Making lunch with his wife Karo Caran, a fellow student from the Overbrook School for the Blind. We watched as sighted people had their first awkward interactions with him. He laughs when he describes how often people raise their hands when he asks questions during his new hire orientation briefings. Well-meaning commuters sometimes escort him to the wheelchair zone on the train platform. It took me a while to realize he’s not offended by questions like “Did you see my email?”

Here’s Victor’s video profile:

Spend any amount of time with Victor and you realize that his blindness doesn’t really make him all that different from anyone else – except that his computer talks to him. Really, really fast.

Read more:

• Victor’s post about screenreaders
• Victor’s post about the launch of our Accessibility Lab in Bangalore
• An interview with Victor about his life and music

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Video credits: producer, Nicki Dugan; cinematographer, Brad Williams; director/editor, Ricky Montalvo
Photo by gingervitis

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And it’s a disease I know all too well.

In 1992, I was diagnosed with breast cancer – days after I started as CEO at my last gig at Autodesk.

I feel lucky to be here sharing this with you today.

But many women are not so fortunate. The effects this disease has on those diagnosed are devastating. It’s a horrible, gut-wrenching experience, physically and emotionally. And we’re still losing the battle. Breast cancer affects 1.3 million women every year – far too many mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, friends and co-workers.

That’s why this month, Yahoo! is getting involved. Some companies let you send in yogurt tops for donations or ask you to contribute at the cash register (all worthy efforts), but we wanted to do something only Yahoo! can. So we’re teaming up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). For each person who updates their pink ribbon status on Yahoo! Shine and Yahoo! Mail this month, we’ll donate $1 to the NBCF (up to $50,000).

The donations will go toward free mammograms for uninsured women, in the hopes that they can benefit from early diagnosis and treatment as I did. It’s a simple way to raise awareness and empower our community of users to make a positive impact in the fight against breast cancer.

I’ve updated my status… have you?

Carol Bartz
CEO

Photo from scrapbooklady

There are 60 million people with disabilities in the U.S. There are more than 10 times that number around the globe. Yahoo!’s Accessibility team wants to make sure that every one of these individuals is able to use Yahoo! as their web site of choice. That will only be possible, of course, if every corner of our network is fully accessible.

While we still have work to do toward that end, we did reach a significant milestone last month when Yahoo! India launched an Accessibility Lab in Bangalore. It is modeled after our Sunnyvale lab, which has demonstrated a variety of assistive technologies to hundreds of Yahoos since it launched in 2008.

Our Accessibility Labs are important tools for engineers who can’t imagine life with a disability. The reality is that not everyone can use a mouse, type on a keyboard, or see the computer screen. We simulate that experience so our developers can learn how to think about users with disabilities during their product development process. We have screen readers to help them understand the experience of a blind user, single switches and onscreen keyboards for physically disabled users, communication devices for kids with speech impairments, etc. More and more Yahoo! products are being designed and developed in our Bangalore office, so it became clear that we needed to enhance our ability to train engineers and designers there.

Here’s a slideshow of photos from our grand opening event in India:

Also, a a global company, we are keenly aware that commercial screen readers are generally out of reach for most blind people living in developing countries. So we’ve sponsored the non-profit NV Access Foundation, which is working on a free, open-source screen reader. Our support will help them improve web features for NVDA for Windows, making it easier for visually-impaired users around the world to browse the Web – especially when they encounter Web 2.0 technologies. And by making NVDA’s screen reader a better product, we’re also helping all the web developers who use it as their testing tool.

Everybody wins.

Victor Tsaran
Sr. Accessibility Program Manager

This morning, at a press conference in Buffalo, New York, with New York Governor David Paterson and Senator Chuck Schumer, we took another big step forward in addressing climate change. We announced plans to build one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world.

This is significant because data centers represent the majority of our energy consumption. Keeping Yahoo! running smoothly for more than 500 million people around the world calls for a lot of server power. So we’ve made it a priority to become a leader in designing and building data centers that are environmentally sustainable, investing millions to design facilities that make the best use of the energy we consume.

Here’s what makes us so proud of our future New York data center plans. First, it will be powered by one of the cleanest utilities in the country – fed predominantly by renewable hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. And second, a record 90% of that energy will power the servers. To put that in context, the industry average is 50% or lower, with the other half dedicated mostly to keeping the servers cool.

For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo Lockport, NY, data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. To achieve that, we’ve come up with a unique building design that we call the Yahoo! Computing Coop (because it looks like something chickens live in), which is angled to take advantage of Buffalo’s microclimate, using 100% outside air to cool the servers.

We’ve been pushing green data center standards since we started building our own data centers two years ago. For example, our facilities in Washington are powered by zero-carbon wind and hydroelectric sources, and we use free cooling for most of the year, dropping energy consumption by 40-50%. As we build more capacity to meet demand, we’ll continue to focus on innovations and inventions that improve energy efficiency. And we’ve been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.

And we’ll continue to push ourselves hard to lower our impact. Today we’re committing to reduce the carbon intensity of our data centers by at least 40% by 2014. In other words, we’ll decrease our average electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from our data centers around the world. We’ll get there through a combination of innovative data center design, improving how we utilize our servers, cloud computing, and locating our data centers in areas where cleaner energy is available.

Reducing our carbon footprint has always been a priority and we’ve decided to focus all our energy and investment on that philosophy. We will no longer purchase carbon offsets as announced in 2007. Instead, we’ll focus our resources on reducing our carbon impact while helping the rest of the industry do the same. We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change.

So the next time you check your email, do a Yahoo! search, or get the latest environmental info on Yahoo! Green, you can feel good about putting some of the greenest data centers in the industry to work.

David Filo
Co-founder and Chief Yahoo

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of Stonewall — widely considered the birth of the modern-day LGBT civil rights movement. It’s been quite a year for Yahoo!’s tens of millions of LGBT users – as well as their countless family members, friends, and supporters.

In the last year, we’ve seen civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians both granted and subsequently taken away from Californians, while also witnessing marriage legalized in 10% of U.S. states and even more countries in Europe. We’ve also seen a further explosion in LGBT pride celebrations across the globe. This year marks the first pride celebrations in China, several countries throughout Central America, and even Tahiti. There were multiple organized events for LGBT rights in cities across India, Russia, Cuba, and nearly 100 new pride celebrations throughout Brazil. Check out the map of over 1,000 LGBT pride events across the globe at pride.yahoo.com for more info.

On the home front, we had a great time again sponsoring San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival this past week. In commemoration of Stonewall’s 40th birthday, we hid free Yahoo! Mail Plus and Flickr Pro packages under the seats of 40 lucky audience members at two sold-out screenings at the historic Castro Theatre. It was an amazing experience to see a packed-house of 1,400 people simultaneously shout out the classic Yahoo! yodel when the prize packages were announced. Congrats to all the winners!

However, that was just the run-up to our big giveaway this pride season. We’re excited to announce that Yahoo! is going to send two winners on a week-long trip to the 2010 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras in beautiful Sydney, Australia, next summer (that’s February, a nice treat for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). Mardi Gras is a spectacular citywide pride event in Sydney, and the prize-winners will arrive in time for the big parade and extravaganza. You can enter to win either online at http://pride.yahoo.com through July 1, 2009, or in person at the Yahoo! booth at the San Francisco LGBT Pride Festival this Sunday, June 28. Please come visit us near the corner of Grove and Larkin Streets on City Hall Plaza, say hi to Yahoo!, and enter for a chance to win.

Again, Yahoo! wishes you and your loved ones happy LGBT Pride 2009!

Drew Geishecker
Co-chair, Yahoo! Pride

Ten years ago, our cofounders and a group of employees gave all Yahoos a really unique way to give back to their communities – they established the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF). Since then, it has generated some pretty impressive statistics:

• More than $8 million in grants to 275 nonprofit organizations;
• More than 225 passionate Yahoo! employees have successfully championed grants for their favorite nonprofit;
• At least 1 in 3 Yahoos in the U.S. have donated to YEF.

Needless to say, these figures make me proud, but they don’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t give credit to the incredible generosity and compassion of Yahoos who rallied together to raise a record $2.1 million in October 2008, just one week after the Dow took the biggest tumble in nearly a decade. This is just one instance of where, in the midst of tough times, my colleagues found it in their hearts to give back to those who were less fortunate.

YEF is unique in that it is 100% run by Yahoo! employee volunteers. Yahoos donate all of the money, champion all of the grants, and organize all volunteer activities, whether building playgrounds or renovating homes. And YEF funds projects that focus on the areas of youth and education, community building and families, and the environment which are chosen by, you guessed it, our employees. One of the best parts of YEF is that by simply donating $50, an employee can champion their favorite organization for a grant of up to $40,000. That’s powerful.

We marked our 10th anniversary milestone with events in U.S. offices from Sunnyvale to New York yesterday. These celebrations were our way of thanking the donors and volunteers who have made YEF what it is today. The Yahoo! Employee Foundation brings out the best in Yahoos, empowering us to give back and make a difference, and is a huge part of why I’m proud to work for Yahoo!.

Here’s video and photos of our thank-you event at our Sunnyvale headquarters:

Rachana Choubey
President, Yahoo! Employee Foundation Board
Sr. Product Manager, Global Front Doors

Video produced and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau

I don’t typically look at frogs as being all that intelligent or pithy but after a few years of replacing all my light bulbs with those swirly ones and dragging my recycling bins to the curb each Tuesday night (rain or shine) now I understand and appreciate what Kermit was talking about all those years; it ain’t easy being green.

It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t care. I tell my son a hundred times a day to turn his bedroom light off when he’s not in his room, my security lights are on a timer so I don’t forget to turn them off, I’ve learned how to brush my teeth with a few drops of water, I use organic cleaners, I eat organic food, etc.

But I’ve found that there just aren’t that many useful and truly ‘green’ consumer products on the market.

I’d love to own a small hybrid car but I don’t think my wife, two kids, baby, blind black lab and a I would fit very well, even though I am on a diet. I recently found some interesting looking coasters made from recycled CD’s, but just because I think it’s cool to have a Def Leppard coaster on my coffee table doesn’t really help anything, does it?

Yahoo! Green’s Make it Green campaign (launched last month) could tangibly help change all of this by inviting regular people from around the world to submit ideas that will improve our lives and ‘green up’ our planet.

You don’t have to be a scientist to enter and you don’t have to have a patented product either. That’s because Yahoo! has teamed up with the company I work for, Edison Nation. We have tons of expertise and experience reviewing products, handling intellectual property, and partnering with manufacturers and retailers to put products onto store shelves.

If your idea is selected, you will earn $2,500, a share of sales for up to twenty years and possibly be featured on PBS’ Emmy award winning invention show Everyday Edisons.

So if you think you have a great green idea, don’t delay — Make it Green ends June 30th!

Kermit and the planet thank you.

Michael Cable
Director, Edison Nation

Douglas Crockford performs tests on human subjects. He likes to make them struggle and then learn from their experience. But it’s all for a good cause.

Douglas is Yahoo!’s resident JavaScript software architect. He has literally written the book on the coding language and his job involves training engineers at Yahoo! and industry-wide to use the code effectively. But he’s long lamented that there isn’t a good reference book for beginners. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and write it himself. But he quickly faced the dilemma of every expert – trying to think like a beginner.

Enter Mountain View High School.

Douglas decided that teaching a course in the principles of computer programming could prove mutually beneficial. So as a school volunteer, he worked with administrators to recruit a handful of willing students (mostly seniors) whose only prerequisite was experience in calculus. For most, this was their first exposure to software. Before long, they were thrown into the deep end of the pool to learn about values, variables, functions, recursion and other complexities of programming. By the end of the 12 weeks, the kids had conquered the basics and Douglas had experienced JavaScript through the eyes of a novice. Everybody won.

Now, this group may not have been statistically significant –- kids growing up in the Silicon Valley get plenty of exposure to technology, thanks to parents who often work at industry giants. And these students are headed to hallowed institutions like Cal Poly, Northwestern, and UC Berkeley to chase engineering degrees. But, nonetheless, they taught Douglas a lot about how to learn.

When Douglas sets off to write the book, I’m sure you’ll find some 17-year-olds in the acknowledgments. Also to be acknowledged are Mountain View High School Principal Keith Moody (also, incidentally, a former Raider defensive back) and teacher Madeline Miraglia, who made Douglas’ volunteer project possible.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor