Hardware Grants
Overview
Free Geek has a Hardware Grants program! What does this mean? Free Geek, as you may or may not already know, receives
Who receives hardware grants?
What types of organizations does Free Geek grant hardware to? From the Grants page:
- Grants are made to organizations, specifically not-for-profit organizations, and not to individuals. We grant hardware to non-profit and social change organizations local to Portland, Oregon; we cannot provide for any kind of shipping to other locations. You must be able to come to Free Geek and pick up the granted hardware.
To be more specific, Free Geek grants hardware to:
- Non-profit organizations
- Schools
- Churches
- Community centers
- Social change organizations
- Worker collectives
Free Geek does not give out hardware grants to individuals. Here's why: we used to give out what we call "passthrough" grants (which are essentially grants that we give to organizations so they can in turn give them to someone else) but stopped doing so because of the technical support issues involved with providing people computers when they hadn't been adequately taught to use the operating system that we provide with them. We instead focus our grants program on providing infrastructure for organizations (computers for an office, for example, or for a public lab setting). Additionally, we feel that giving individuals the opportunity to earn their computers, rather than simply giving them computers, can provide them with a sense of empowerment and responsible ownership that is oftentimes infinitely more valuable than the physical product itself.
What types of hardware does Free Geek give out?
We can give out a lot of different stuff. The list on the Grants page is a bit out of date. The following list is by no means complete, but we can readily give out:
- GrantBoxen
- CRT Monitors
- 64MB - 512MB sticks of SDRAM (quantity becomes limited as module size increases)
- Keyboards
- Mice
- Computer cases
- Floppy, CDROM or Zip drives
- Small (~4-10GB) hard drives
- Ethernet, sound or video cards
- Short to medium length networking cable
Essentially, if we've got lots of it, we're willing to grant it out. We do grant out rarer things when they are available, such as:
- Laptops
- Projectors
- LCD Monitors
- Enterprise-level equipment
Keep in mind that, overall, that the amount of equipment we can give out per grant is limited by what we have on hand. At the moment, we can give an organization up to six GrantBoxen per month. Laptops are limited to two per year.
Does the organization's location matter?
Yes and no. We simply don't have the means to ship the types of hardware typically requested in grants, so we are limited to providing hardware grants to organizations that are able to pick up grants from us. However, we are more than willing to provide hardware to organizations in any location of the world as long as they can provide a local contact that can pick up hardware from us and handle the rest.
Can I get involved?
Yes! Free Geek is always looking for reliable volunteers interested in facilitating hardware grants. If you'd like to get involved, simply let a staff member know so they can take create a RT account for you. Once you have one, read this page: Using RT for Hardware Grants.