Colleen Creer, a 26-year-old customer service rep from Portland, Oregon, was in a bind at the end of last year. She’d just lost her in-person job with a major retailer due to a COVID-19 closure and wanted to do the same type of work remotely. One problem: Creer, who has lived on the edge of poverty for years, didn’t have a computer.
Enter Free Geek, a nonprofit in Portland that salvages broken laptops, tablets and desktops, fixes them and provides them at low or no-cost to people who can’t afford new ones. But while the pandemic heightened the demand for Free Geek’s repaired computers, corporate policies preventing easy access to parts, manuals and equipment made it harder for the nonprofit to complete its mission.
“It’s made the difference between me being able to obtain my housing and put food on my table and obtain my puppy and have him here,” Creer said of her new desktop computer. “I just took my driver’s permit test. Things like that. I wouldn’t have been able to get them done if I hadn’t gotten the computer from Free Geek.”
The pandemic has made living without a computer harder than ever. Employees are working remotely, kids are going to school via laptop, and grandparents are visiting with their grandkids on screens. At the same time, the pandemic has made it harder to get broken devices fixed, as many big chain stores have ceased offering on-site repairs. As a result, people have been forced to send their devices to authorized repair facilities—often waiting weeks for them to be returned.
Many are powerless to avoid that inconvenience because small repair shops and do-it-yourselfers ..
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