The Laptops for Kids program started at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year. When all kids in our school district were going to be starting virtually. I learned that our district only had enough laptops to issue one per household. Asking around, we found out that many school districts were the same or in some cases, weren’t issued one at all. This meant that some children wouldn’t be able to participate in live education and some were being left behind all together. For the first few, I had a few older laptops sitting around and with a little TLC they’d be more than capable to have a second life facilitating online learning. We put the word out looking for anyone who may need one and found a significant number of people in need.
Through engaging our networks and community, we were able to gather together donations both monetary and hardware and in just a few months were able to get 20 laptops into the hands of children across Virginia in a roughly 3 month period.
Donations were given based on just a statement of need as validation and the children got to keep the laptops. In many cases, families had an older or broken laptop that they would donate back in return which we were then able to refurbish and put back out into the world. Any hardware that we couldn’t rescue was taken for recycling. In addition to the help it provided children in securing their education, it gave many laptops a second life as well as kept many more out of landfills.
Powerful Progress was able to take care of the full logistics and IT chain from refurbishment, purchases, shipping, troubleshooting, and education.
Currently we now have a small inventory ready as well as processes in place to refurbish donated laptops and get them into the hands of families quickly. We hope to scale this program further in preparation for the coming school year and are gladly accepting donations of unused laptops or monetary donations to cover the cost of new SSD hard drives, RAM, and other accessories, as well as to cover the shipping to the new recipients.
