Leeds Tech Angels is a collaboration project between Digital Access West Yorkshire and Solidaritech, and is supported by Leeds City Council, Ahead Partnership and Zero Waste Leeds. Tech Angels is funded by Leeds Community Foundation.
Solidaritech was founded in 2017 to help Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Yorkshire & Humber. We do this by setting up community Computer labs with refurbished IT equipment. Since 2017 we have donated 250+ machines to some of society’s most marginalised and cash-poor people. Our work supports refugees setting up small businesses and helps people study to convert their qualifications to British ones.
Digital Access West Yorkshire (DAWY) was founded in April 2020 to be a community-based, democratic and participatory response to digital exclusion in Leeds and the surrounding area. DAWY has donated around 50 machines out to digitally excluded children and young people in Leeds since.
Getting Involved
We are a community initiative, and are responding to what we’ve seen is a clear and prevalent need across the city, the county and the country. If you would like to help then we would love to hear from you.
Here are a few ways in which you can be involved:
Businesses
We understand that this is a tough time for everyone, and over the course of 2020 businesses have been placed under massive amounts of strain, but it’s in tough times that we come together and, as a business, this is a chance for you to make a real difference to the lives of young people and to invest in our future.
Our ask to business is two fold, if you can spare any of your business machines for donation then that would be great. But we understand that you require certainty around what happens to your kit. Our Data Wiping page gives you plenty of ways you can wipe the data from your machines yourself, but if you require certificates to prove data erasure then a service like Blancco is great, and they even offer a free trial.
If your business doesn’t have any spare, donate-able kit then you can always ask your staff members whether they do. We treat all of the donations the same, wiping them at the earliest possible point, but our Data Wiping page shows plenty of free and easy ways in which the machines can be wiped of your data prior to donating them to us.
Individuals
If you are an individual and would still like to help, you might want to consider donating your spare laptops. You might even want to collect machines on our behalf and wipe them for us. In this case we would still wipe them again at our end – as this is a promise to all donors.
Also, if you are an IT person this would be doubly helpful. Get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can do to help you get started to help digitally excluded young people in Leeds.