The Syndicate sponsors the charity known as Youth Opportunity Unlimited. YOU supports inner city youth with a variety of programs that encourage them to stay in school, helps them with tutoring, builds playgrounds and parks and things of that nature. Each year, The Syndicate hosts a charity raffle to help support their projects. This year's raffle filled 18 feet of tablespace piled high with games, t-shirts, posters, water bottles, cards, backpacks and much more. Our sponsors included: Dell, Codemasters, Blizzard, Funcom, Turbine, Netdevil, Flying Labs, Sony Online Entertainment, Prima Games, 38 Studios, and Kings Isle along with a number of Syndicate themed items. The event was a huge success with more than 1400 tickets were sold to the raffle. Our donation to YOU for 2008 will double what we donated in 2007. Thank you to all of our sponsors who helped enable us to support a very worthwhile charity.


Victor, Juan and Peter (the founders of Pure West Media) put on a special screening of the Second Skin MMORPG documentary. Peter described the screening as a big confidence boost. The Syndicate is featured in the movie and so it was of special interest to the 130+ members present at the screening. After the screening there was a spirited Q&A about the film with some probing questions being asked. For example the movie does show some of the darker sides to gaming. Without spoiling one of the plot twists, there is a moment near the end that grabs you in a way that many in the audiance don't expect. That was asked about and Juan explained the motivation behind showing that side of things. The movie also explores a number of very positive things about gaming from the creation of virtual communities like The Syndicate, to people falling in love by meeting online to life-long friends having a way to escape the day to day grind of their jobs. I would highly recommend seeing the movie to anyone that has a screening in their area.