Create Satellite Computer Refurbishing Projects

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life."
- Chinese Proverb

The Chinese Proverb makes a lot of sense. We have plenty of space available for our Computer Refurbishing Project, but it is still limited, and when a news article is published in the local paper or when our project is mentioned on tv and it prompts a lot of donations at one time it frequently is filled up with material to be evaluated. We have some very good people working on our project, but the number of people we can motivate to participate is still limited, so we adapted the idea of "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life", and adopted our variation:

"Fix an old computer for a man
and he will have a computer that will fill his needs for a while.
Teach a man to fix computers
and he will have a computer for the rest of his life,
and he can fix computers for his friends and neighbors."

This concept started when Jim Erwin of the Belize Bible and Trade School came to Tulsa and spent a few months working with us on Computer Refurbishing, and then went back to Belize and began teaching computer repair classes at the Belize school. After completing his program, students were able to get some of the best paying jobs in the entire country, since there were practically no trained computer repair technicians in Belize.

After spending a year or so teaching Computer Repair at the Belize Bible and Trade School, Jim returned to Tulsa and is currently leading the Bethesda Adult Life Training Center side of our joint project. He has a team of volunteers who come in every day to work on refurbish computers, he teaches the boys at Bethesda Adult Life Training Center how to repair computers, giving them a trade they can fall back on when they leave the Ranch, and he teaches classes at Central Tech (one of Oklahoma's Technology Centers (formerly called VoTech), and his students refurbish some of our computers also. The TCS volunteers still get together at Bethesda Adult Life Training Center on the 1st, 4th, (and if there is one, 5th) Saturdays of each month, and we work on the problem computers that the others could not get to work, and I do everything I can to publicize our joint project, and bring in more donations for us to work on.

The machines that are donated to our project are old machines, and while we fix anything that is broken in them when we get them, they are more likely to develop new problems than are newly manufactured machines. Therefore we have established a policy that if an agency requests more than 10 machines, we strongly urge them to send someone to work with our people for a few weeks, to learn how we do what we do, so that they can fix any of the machines we provide them if they break after they receive them, and so that if they receive donations from people in their area, that they can do the same Computer Refurbishing we do.

We have assisted the creation of Computer Refurbishing operations in:

We have provided them copies of the disks and other tools we use, and in some cases have provided a supply of spare parts and even donated computers needing repair, as well as operational machines for them to use immediately.

Working through APCUG's Community Service committee and National Cristina Foundation I would like to exchange ideas about how each User Group running a Computer Refurbishing Project operates. It may be that other groups can learn from what we have done, and it may be that we can also learn from what they have done, and that the programs of all groups will benefit from this sharing of ideas. To assist in this exchange of ideas I have set up a couple of conferences on APCUG's WebBoard. For further information on how to participate in those conferences see this page.