Successful Small-Scale Computer Refurbishing

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Maureen Wilson of Kidango in Fremont, California is a great example of a small neighborhood noncommercial computer refurbisher. Kidango is a nonprofit that runs childcare centers for low-income, homeless, and AIDs-afflicted children and infants in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Maureen went to work at Kidango three years ago as a temporary worker in the agency's administrative office. When the agency's then-tech support company charged Kidango $300 to come out and swap out a $10 mouse, she was quickly recruited to be the organization's accidental computer techie because she had the knack for making computers behave. Her sole training in this area was one Mac repair class in 1996.

Becoming familiar with the state of Kidango's computers and also becoming aware of teacher requests for computers in the childcare centers, Maureen quickly took it upon herself to solicit on Kidango's Web site for better computers. As the computer donations started coming in, Maureen began working nights and weekends to establish an operation to refurbish the donated equipment. For five months she put in an extra 45 hours per week of volunteer time in addition to her full-time schedule. At the end of that time, she had swapped out the older administrative computers and also supplied 35 teacher computers and 20 classroom computers.

She now works on the project about 10 hours per week, still as a volunteer, cycling older equipment out and supplying 50 additional computers to the childcare centers. She has a couple of boxes of spare parts, picks up donations in her car, stores computers in her carport, and occasionally uses Kidango's small work room. She also answers the switchboard phones.

When asked what drives her to do all this work, Maureen says it's the teachers. She's doing it for them. Maureen is proud to be a true-blue computer geek, more interested in than frustrated by computer problems. She is not afraid of any computer problem and is not afraid to ask for volunteer help or donations. Maureen constantly searches for donations, from cruising yard sales and grocery store bulletin boards to making calls to Fujitsu.