As we conclude the 2011 celebration week of AmeriCorps service honoring past and present AmeriCorps members, HandsOn Network has partnered with Google to create HandsOn Tech, enabling 24 new AmeriCorps*VISTA positions.

HandsOn Tech is an initiative designed to help nonprofits effectively use technology to further their missions.  These AmeriCorps*VISTA members will work full-time for one year developing introductory seminars and involved in-person trainings for smaller nonprofits that are working to lift people out of poverty. The HandsOn Tech members will start in September with a one-week training at our campus in Mountain View, learning about both our nonprofit tools and cloud-based offerings from other technology companies like Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Once they are armed with tech know-how, they’ll spend the rest of the year in three-person teams serving nonprofits in the Bay Area, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Placing AmeriCorps members around the country for in-person support provides a much-needed complement to programs like Google for Nonprofits, which makes it easy for nonprofits to take advantage of offers like $10,000 a month in advertising on Google AdWords to reach more donors and free or discounted Google Apps to cut IT costs.

Amy Smith, president of HandsOn Netork said, “Building nonprofit and community technical capacity, knowledge and adoption will lead to increased efficiency in nonprofit operations, greater collaboration locally and nationally, and increased communications among organizations and individuals with similar challenges and goals. . . We believe leveraging technology in this way will lead to greater impact in addressing the issues facing our communities.”

Click here to read Google’s blog post about HandsOn Tech.

If you’re passionate about both technology and giving back, then we hope you’ll apply to be part of the HandsOn Tech.