Join Us

There are three ways to join Carol's Team:

As a sponsor:

Writing a major piece of software is an expensive undertaking, even when much of the work is being done for free. We also have expenses relating to our outreach and awareness activities. At this point we are supported solely through the generosity of our individual sponsors, although we are working on some corporate arrangements.

Carol's Team is a non-profit organization and your contribution is fully tax deductible. You may send donations to:

Carol's Team
12474 Larkwood Drive
St. Louis, MO  63146

We would like to put our sponsors on the web site, but if you prefer to be anonymous, just let us know. If there's a special message you'd like to post also, please send that along as well. We particularly like getting notes from people who know Carol or have other first-hand experience with ALS patients.

If you like what we're doing, but are more comfortable supporting a more established organization, we suggest the ALS Foundation and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Both help ALS victims and are active in supporting the use of communication devices. It would be helpful to both our efforts and theirs if you told them we sent you.

As a participant:

If you'd like to participate directly in our outreach and awareness activities, including racing with the team, send us an email indicating your interest. While we do have some accomplished athletes on the team, we are not exclusive. In fact, you don't have to race at all. We can always use support people.

We should state that if what you're looking for is some sort of sweet sponsorship deal, you've pretty much missed the point of this organization. It's true that our athletes who raise enough money receive some assistance with expenses, but they could easily get better deals via more traditional sponsorship arrangements.

This is an opportunity to turn a fun activity into something that can touch people's lives in a very meaningful way.

As a developer:

If you have some software expertise that you'd like to lend to the efforts, we could surely use the help. The code will be written in C++ unless we get overrun by offers from Java programmers. Experience with pattern recognition, hashing, and fuzzy logic is a plus, but not required.

Most of the effort involves working with the linguistic database. Anybody with a firm command of the English language can help in this regard. We also need users - lots of 'em - to help test the product and tune the word distribution.