A local IT company has partnered up with LEADER to help provide technology solutions for Ukrainian families who’ve settled locally.
BITS is asking people to donate tablets and laptops which are still in working order.
They plan to refurbish them for use by the refugee families who have arrived here.
CEO Gavin Dixon says the idea is to help people communicate with people home or for kids trying to settle into new schools telling KCLR News; “We just start asking ourselves is there anything we can do, how can we help and obviously technology is really important in today’s world about keeping in contact maybe for people who are coming over to keep in contact with those that are left behind or even something as practical as the kids, teenagers to keep connected with education, so we thought let’s look at maybe trying to facilitate them with technology”.
He says “What we’re appealing for is anybody who has laptops lying around and this tends to happen I think people might get a new device, a new laptop and they have the old one and put it in the drawer thinking they’re going to do something with that and what we’re asking people to do is just rummage around in those drawers, find that laptop and if it’s in working order at all, even if it’s a bit slow or whatever, we get our hands on it we’ll be able to refurbish it is the expression is used, get it up and running again, most people just need an internet connect to be able to get it up and running and get connectivity happening”.
And he adds that they’re looking for “Primarily laptops and the reason behind that is it can be quite difficult to try and reset up we’ll say a tablet device if it’s connected to an Apple account and stuff like that so we wouldn’t turn our nose up over it at all but it may make it more difficult for it to work because the assumption is whoever’s getting it needs an Apple account to be able set-up, for example, an Apple iPad device but as I said we wouldn’t be fussy in general but we do need the device to work”.
