2011 Year in Review

Free IT Athens has had a great year thanks to all of the community support we have received.  This year, we had over 370 volunteers contribute over 3,500 hours of volunteer service!  Volunteers helped refurbish and distribute over 190 computers to those in the Athens, Georgia community and saved over 18,000 pounds of electronic waste from ending up in landfills.

Although we have experienced growing pains, we made some significant accomplishments this year.  In April, we moved from our Oconee Street location to a separate location on Prince Avenue that we are sharing with another non-profit organization.  This move allowed the organization to mature and help us better understand the cost of our operations.  We received our first grant from the ACTION, Inc. sponsored Building Community Services That Grow Local Economies fund which has helped us increase our organizational capacity tremendously.
 
Since we received the grant we have expanded our trainings outside of Athens-Clarke county, have worked with new and diverse populations, created 6 new public computer labs (three being outside of Athens-Clarke county), and have expedited and improved our computer refurbishing processes.  We were recognized in a National Merit Award for our work with the Nellie B. community.  We also held our board elections in November; the board changes may be viewed by clicking here.

We participated in numerous community fairs and activities (e.g. Greenlife Expo, Southeast Linuxfest, Athens Volunteer Fair, Software Freedom Day) and held a special day of learning for High School students from Atlanta.  Our equipment donations this year have gone up tremendously as well. If you donated, we appreciate your support.  If you volunteered with us, we sincerely appreciate your help and hope that you had a great experience.  Without our volunteers and donors, we would not exist.  We thank you.

Special thanks go out to the following volunteers for their exceptional efforts: Brian Pitts, Charles James, David Blackmon, David Millard, Drew Worthey, Ed Beaudoin, Jake Hays, Jessica Izlar, Mike Henley, Natania Joiner, Rachel Rotz, Ryan Hague, Semmy Purewal, Seth Brown, Stephen Joiner and Zoe-Gabrielle Miroy. As we enter the 2012 year we look forward to more growth and exciting opprtunities and challenges.  We are always in need of computer and financial donations.  If you would like to donate, please click here. Thank you for your support.