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MRC Donation Helps Mississippi BoyChoir
In Jackson Mississippi can be found the Mississippi Boychoir. For the past 26 years they have trained young boys with talent to sing and to provide them with the opportunity to sing inside and outside the state.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has restricted their community presentations. So, like good Netcitizens, they want to do concerts online. But lacking the technical stuff makes that a bit difficult.
I do not know how they found the Clinic, but the leader of the group for overseas operations wrote MacRecycleClinic a letter. Her request arrived at the same time that we were collecting Macintosh equipment from The River School in Washington, DC.
I was able to match the specifications for the online Macintosh music production application donated to them with one of the iMac models from River School. With an iMac that fit their needs, the BoyChoir paid to package and ship the computer with keyboard and mouse to Jackson.
Over the last three decades, MacRecycleClinic has donated refurbished Mac laptops, desktops, towers and Mac Minis to those who don’t have computers or who want to put together a lab for students who may not have home Internet. We recently started refurbishing Chromebooks as well. There is a great need.
The BoyChoir is a great example of a non-profit with a need that we are thrilled to help. If we could make just a small contribution for their December program, we were thrilled to do it!
Helping People is What We Do!
One of our favorite shots of Jim – here at a MacWorld Conference in NYC many years ago.
Always great to hear these kinds of stories that we can pass along to our Recyclemac readers.
This one comes from our own Jim Ritz – a long-time member of the MacRecycleClinic and the old Tuesday Night Crew at Washington Apple Pi when the club had a physical office in Rockville.
Jim writes:
Recently one of (MRC volunteer) Phil Marchetti’s clients said she had an old iMac that was of unknown status. She asked Phil if he could fix it and maybe she could pass it in to her handyman who couldn’t afford to buy a computer.
Phil said it worked but needed ram and who knows what else. Hearing the specs I knew we had ram of the type it needed. We increased the ram from 256 MB to 2.0 GB and installed the latest Mac OS that early Intel could handle and passed it on. The client gave MRC a donation as well.
This was a Win, Win, Win situation for all involved!
It is what MRC does.
Tower Computers for Critical Exposure
MacRecycleClinic has been working for a few weeks to get a number of PPC towers ready for a Washington, D.C. based non profit called Critical Exposure.
We found out about this non-profit that “teaches youth to use the power of photography and their own voices to become effective advocates for school reform and social change” through Bethany Swain, a former CNNer and current lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Bethany’s students have gone to Critical Exposure’s offices to mentor their students. One of the Merrill Journalists as they are called, Louie Dane, wrote a retrospective for the Merrill News website.
Maryland journalism student Louie Dane mentors a Critical Exposure participant.
When we get a request like this – the first questions we always ask at the MacRecycleClinic is what do you want to DO with the computers and what software would you LIKE to have. The answers to those questions provide the focus we need to put together the “package” they receive.
In Critical Exposure’s case, their students want to do multimedia – video, photo and audio editing. So on top of the “regular” OS X install we do, there were some additional things to add. Since none of these machines can go higher than OS 10.5.8, we had to make sure that the software we included could work with the last PPC Tower from Apple before the company moved to Intel. We would have loved to provide Intel machines with Final Cut Express (donations welcome), but folks are holding on to their Intel towers these days because Apple has not come out with a new update in quite a while. And FCE is hard to come by in numbers (Apple no longer offers it in fact).
That said, these machines run a good, stable and powerful version of the Mac OS and are very capable computers for what Critical Exposures students would like to do. There may be issues with third party software – Flash, Adobe Reader, etc. but not enough to make that much of a difference. These machines are ignored by hackers as well – one less worry.
Five Myths About Recycling Your Mac
1) I’m Just One Person – What Does It Matter?
Time and again, we see examples of individuals really making a difference. The 7 year old who raises money to help the families of our Wounded Warriors. The cancer victim who walks with many others each year to raise research funds. The church members who individually volunteer their time at everything from soup kitchens to homeless shelters. Americans like to look on themselves as individuals but the fact is we work pretty well together when there’s a need. Recycling computers and other electronics is important and something we can all be part of. Whether you donate your old PowerMac G4, G5, iMac, eMac or Intel machine to a group like MacRecycleClinic to refurbish for others, take it to your local Apple, Best Buy or other store for recycling or your county or state recycling center, you make a difference each time you or your neighbor makes the decision to recycle rather than throw away.
MacRecycleClinic Photos
iFixit Blog
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