First, before we get to our ASK, we want to thank you for all your support. You have contributed in so many ways. From single personal donations of equipment or funds, to larger business/block donations, and even just word of mouth recommendations, your support has allowed us to:

• Give more than 1100 laptops to local students in need.
• Share more than 150 free WiFi hotspots with families who otherwise would not have it at home.
• Support over 135 High School volunteers in our lab, contributing more than 3500 hours of service to the community.
• Responsibly repurpose electronics that would have otherwise gone to a landfill, saving approximately 2 tons of waste.

In addition to helping individual students as they request laptops, we recently equipped the STEAM lab at Buzz Aldrin Middle School with 25 MacBook Pro laptops. We also upgraded the technology lab at Frank J. Napier, Jr. school in Paterson, NJ.  All this tied to your generous support. 

But, we want to do so much more for those in need. The challenges in our and neighboring communities continue, and many students STILL don’t have the tools they need to succeed in school.

Yesterday on a beautiful Spring day Cynthia and Jon delivered 52 freshly refurbished small form factor i3 desktops to the Frank J. Napier, Jr. school in Paterson, NJ. Principal Derwin Smith and Vice-Principal Jennifer Woods will use the new workstations to both replace the aging XP vintage desktops in their computer lab and update the devices driving the smart boards in classrooms. Cynthia Newlin, Laptop Upcycle Board member and long time volunteer, established the relationship with the technology focused school and has led the way by helping us deliver over 30 laptops two months ago directly to students in need at the school. The updated lab will allow teachers at the school top better support their tech programs at the school.

As always, this was a team effort and we have a number of people and organizations to thank. In addition to the amazing work by Cynthia, we appreciate:

• The Electronic Access Foundation (EAF) and Greg Campbell for the supply of small footprint devices they shared with us via our partnership within the Digitunity network.
  
• Our lab volunteers led by Mike Brown who worked so hard to wipe, renovate, update, and clean the donated desktops, and our technical lead Mark Zbucki who helped us with the updates to support the equipment.
• Finally, we are exceedingly grateful to Principal Smith and Vice-Principal Woods for being such positive advocates in support of their community and students. We are pleased to work with such powerful leaders of public school education in Northern NJ. Thank you!