Laptop Upcycle congratulates fellow Montclair nonprofit Sister to Sister on the inauguration of their new lab at 11 Pine Street. Sisiter to Sister is one of the groups supported by Succeed2gether at this location. Our primary mission of course is to deliver high quality refurbished laptops and free wifi hotspots to students in need.  In the course of our work to support these students we also often meet leaders of other local nonprofits. We hear their stories and we always try to think of other ways to help. Sister to Sister is one such success story.

We met their Director, Dr. Doris Bennett (above), in our lab back in October of 2019. She had been working with her team to provide after school mentoring and a study lab that could also support a series of STEAM classes and needed equipment. We had recently  provided 10 laptops to the Mindful Awareness Academy for Children (MAAC) upstairs in the United Way building and luckily we had also been informed by one of our partners, Greg Campbell at the Electronic Access Foundation that one of his clients had a group of small form desktops available for donation. A plan was hatched!

The Electronic Access team coordinated the pick up of the generous donation from a local medical support organization in Parsippany and delivered the 10 HP desktops to our lab in Montclair. Once onsite, we did what we always do first to new equipment, our student volunteers wiped the drives and documented the destruction of all the information on the machines. Since these were donated from a medical firm, we also provided a detailed report on each machine processed to Greg for his donor. Then our team jumped in and imaged the machines for the Sister to Sister lab with our education focused Linux package. In November Jon delivered the machines to the lab and helped them set up the lab.

The first Bootcamp for the students in the new lab was in December on mobile application design and Sister to Sister looks to continue the after school program through 2020. We would also be remiss if we didn't mention that the Sister to Sister Secretary Lisa White has been awesome throughout this process and she even coordinated individual laptop GETS for a dozen Sister to Sister High School students. We're excited that we could help and we are thankful to all mentioned in this post for their help in making it a success! Sister to Sister is making a huge difference in Montclair and we're glad we could help them realize their dream.