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MINNEAPOLIMEDIA NEWS | Moorhead Student Technology Agency Opens Project Applications for Small Businesses and Nonprofits
Dragon Ember Solutions seeks manageable community projects that give students supervised experience with real organizational needs.
MOORHEAD, MN (October 27, 2026). Small businesses and nonprofit organizations seeking help with basic technology projects can apply to work with Dragon Ember Solutions, a student-run agency at Minnesota State Moorhead.
The initiative connects community organizations with students in the university’s Computer Science and Information Systems Department. Applications are due Friday, November 20, at 5 p.m., with selected projects scheduled for the spring semester.
The launch was reported October 26 by The Flag, which described a limited first cohort serving local and regional organizations under faculty supervision. The report identified professor Juan Cabanela as the program coordinator.
Projects Matched to Student Skills
The university identifies potential work in three areas: website support, basic data administration and information-technology documentation.
Examples include page updates, simple website troubleshooting, spreadsheet cleanup, data reformatting, basic reports, technology inventories and hardware or software assessments.
Available services will depend on the students participating each semester. Applicants therefore need to describe a specific problem and the result they hope to receive, allowing the program to assess whether the work fits its educational scope.
A Learning Partnership With Defined Limits
Dragon Ember Solutions is a supervised learning lab. The university explicitly says students are developing entry-level skills and that deliverables are offered on a best-effort educational basis.
Projects run from approximately mid-January through early May. That semester schedule and the program’s stated limits are important considerations for organizations with urgent operational needs.
The Flag’s launch report describes the agency as a way to combine practical community assistance with experience students can carry into employment. Faculty oversight is part of that model, and limited initial capacity means an inquiry should not be treated as a guaranteed placement.
Submitting a Project
The Dragon Ember Solutions application page requests organizational and contact information, a service category, a brief project summary and expected deliverables.
For applicants, the strongest starting point is a clearly bounded task: what needs attention, what information is available and what a useful completed result would look like. Organizations should confirm any proposed scope, schedule and costs directly before relying on the arrangement.
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