Overview

Let’s start with the formalities. Here’s our Official Mission Statement:

It’s a mission that’s worked for us through the many changes since our founding in February 2000. For all those years, we’ve taken tired, poor, wretched, homeless, tempest-tossed and arguably obsolete electronic materials from all over the Portland area and beyond. Believing firmly that reuse is the highest and best form of recycling, we refurbish as much of that stuff as we can and send it back out into the community with a new lease on life. The stuff that doesn’t make the grade is not banished to landfills to leach toxics into the water table. Nor is it sent to developing nations to be disassembled by small children. We do our very best to make sure that all electronic materials we don’t reuse are responsibly recycled within North America. Free Geek recycles approximately 500 tons of scrap per year and puts thousands of refurbished computers back into the hands of people who will use them.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of Free Geek. At any given time, about 500 are active, greeting donors, processing the aforementioned electronics, teaching classes, and generally running the place. The “job skills training” and “community service” mentioned above? They’re often the same thing, as volunteers learn while doing. One of our most popular programs is our Build Program, in which volunteers learn about computer hardware, troubleshooting skills, and eventually put together the computers we give out. We don’t require any prior knowledge to volunteer at Free Geek. If you’re interested in serving the community or just having fun as a Free Geek volunteer, check out this page.

We are proud of being a democratically-run organization, and use consensus to make our decisions. Our structure is fairly unusual because we want all levels of decision-making to be open to our community of volunteers.

If you want to learn more about FREE GEEK, please join one of the informative tours we offer at noon and 5 pm Tuesday through Saturday. Find Us

We were the first, but there are other Free Geeks. To find out if there’s one in your area, check out this page.