Our teams work hard to help clients bring the best new treatments to market, so they deserve the best tools to do it! It was CHR’s great pleasure to be able to provide our staff with new laptops this year. However, it was an even greater pleasure to be able to then donate all our old laptops to those who would benefit from them!

We decided to partner up with Green Duck, who support all our IT needs, and begin to roll out our new laptops, whilst recycling the old ones. Green Duck did an amazing job wiping the old laptops and getting them ready for their new homes. We have donated over 70 laptops thus far to charities who needed them: AgeUK, Barracudas Children’s Camp, Cambridge Online, Little Teapots and Cambridge Science Centre.

The feedback we’ve received has been heart-warming! AgeUK said: “Thank you for selecting us to receive some of your laptops. Congratulations on your upgrade! We are delighted to have them, and they will be extremely useful in enabling us to deliver efficiencies in our services and to introduce digital sites/skills to older people. Some staff must come into our offices to enter their administration work onto our system. These laptops will mean they will be able to do this at home, giving them more community time with older people and make a significant cost saving to our charity. It also means that they can be taken into older people’s homes and activities can be carried out together, for example on-line shopping, video calling and researching memories/information/photos.”

Andrew Farrer, Head of Programmes and Delivery at Cambridge Science Centre said: “A suite of laptops is a huge support for our Delivery and our Science Communicators when they are out on the road. Laptops allow our Science Communicators to be self-sufficient while on the road, and can be used for displaying presentations, providing secure access to our shared drives, and collecting feedback and evaluation from our audiences. In addition, having laptops that can be used within our delivery allows us to give classes/groups of children identical machines with the same software and resources. This will allow us to expand our existing workshops that have software requirements and realise ideas for new products (e.g., research challenges as part of our STEM Club sessions). A donation of laptops makes a significant impact to the Centre.”

James Lewis from Cambridge Online shared with us “It’s really great to see a local company proactively reaching out to local charities to help reduce digital inequality. These laptops will help people to access job interviews, online training, and schooling, connect with family, access vital support and services and more. We’re really grateful to Cambridge Healthcare Research for caring and ensuring older laptops will be put to essential use”.

We are so glad that we were able to put our old devices to great use and look forward to continuing this initiative over the months and years to come for more charities.