Central Jersey nonprofit helps bridge the digital divide

• Since the founding of the Electronic Access Foundationin 2011, an estimated 1,500 donations have been made.
• The nonprofit receives computers and other technology from corporate donors, refurbishes them, and donates them.
• The donated computers reach people as young as pre-school and as old as senior citizens.

Ryan McFadden is bridging the digital divide one computer at a time.

He is the executive director of the Electronic Access Foundation — a nonprofit that receives computers and other pieces of technology from corporate donors, wipes the hard drives, adds new operating software, and then donates the refurbished technology to other nonprofits and charitable organizations.

Since the founding of the Electronic Access Foundation (EAF) in 2011, McFadden estimates that more than 1,500 computers and other pieces of technology have been donated. The donations come at no expense to the recipients.

The donated computers reach people as young as pre-school and as old as senior citizens living in care centers.

"EAF was founded under the pretense that the digital divide in this country is growing," said McFadden, who lives in the Neshanic Station section of Branchburg. He described the nonprofit as a "community outreach organization" that is able to "help people and bridge the digital divide."

McFadden said a lot of what has been accomplished at EAF has come from the help of volunteers, like Greg Campbell, who handles logistics and operations for EAF, and Sean Dolbec, who writes programs to wipe the hard drives of the donated pieces of technology.

How it started

Like the recipients of many of the donations, EAF was birthed from hardship.

In 2008, the financial crisis was forcing banks and other institutions to shutter operations. Frederick McFadden, Ryan's father, was a senior loan officer at a mortgage company and suddenly out of a job.

"I became instantly unemployed and unprepared," Frederick McFadden said. "I was forced to go down to unemployment, and, sitting at unemployment, I noticed they were unprepared as well for being inundated with unemployed individuals, and they had limited resources with computers."

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With a lack of computers and an influx of men looking for jobs to provide for their families, arguments would near a fist-fighting level, he said.

"There were only a half-dozen computers," he said. "These men were desperate to find a job."

After his experience at the unemployment office, McFadden inadvertently found a job with an electronic recycling company.

"What they do is smash the computers apart for the commodities inside," he explained. As he was smashing apart bits of computers, he thought back to the men scrabbling at the unemployment office, realizing then that those men probably did not have computers at home.

McFadden said that he didn't fully understand the struggle for disadvantaged people until he was working side-by-side them.

"Going from a nice house, to a nice office, to a nice a lunch, back to a nice office, back to a nice home, I never saw what was going on in between — what was actually occurring in life," he said.

He thought about why the computers that he was smashing apart for $10-an-hour were not donated to people like the men he had seen at the unemployment office.

"They needed jobs," he said. "And without a computer, you can't look for a job, apply for a job, follow up on a job."

With these experiences in mind, McFadden began pondering the premise of EAF.

"It all fell into place," he said. "It was like God's will."

Getting it going

After 13 long months of filling out and submitting paperwork, EAF was setup in 2011 and approved as a nonprofit. Since then, the organization has donated to many different nonprofits and charitable organizations, including churches, community outreach groups and schools.

McFadden said it is important that the youth have access to technology, especially now that school assignments and college applications are increasingly being pushed to online.

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"If the young people don't get involved with technology, the gap between their knowledge and everyone will just continue to get larger and larger," he said. "These guys will just get left behind."

After running the nonprofit for a couple years, McFadden passed the reins over to his son, Ryan, who has been executive director of EAF for about 3 years now and says he learned about refurbishing through a "trial by fire" while helping his father.

More recently, under Ryan McFadden's leadership, EAF has partnered up with the National Cristina Foundation — a nonprofit that works to get refurbished technology to other nonprofits throughout the country.

The technology is given to people with disabilities, at-risk students and economically disadvantaged individuals, according to Bud Rizer, the CEO of the National Cristina Foundation.

"We help nonprofits and schools who serve those three populations," he said. "We've been doing it for 33 years. Our mission has never changed, but how we do it has changed significantly."

The National Cristina Foundation has about 1,300 partner organizations throughout the country. EAF has been a partner of the National Cristina Foundation for 2-1/2 years, representing a subgroup of partners that consists of about 75 technology refurbishers. The remainder of the foundation's 1,300 partners serve people rather than handle technology.

The subgroup of refurbishers started the Alliance for Technology Refurbishing and Reuse in order to have more access to technology donors and recipients throughout the country by using the network of the National Cristina Foundation.

"There's a certain point where all computers don't really have any value, they need to be destroyed. But when it comes down to its first life, there's a very good chance that it's got enough life to keep on working," Rizer said. "There are organizations out there, I mentioned 75 of them, that know how to take that old technology and make it workable again."

EAF does just that.

Who has been helped

Some of EAF's recipients include the Puerto Rican Action Board in New Brunswick, Simuel Whitfield Simmons Organization, Middle Earth, United Way of Northern New Jersey and a Hurricane Sandy resource center during the storm.

EAF also pushed an initiative where the nonprofit donated 100 computers in 100 days.

In 2015, the Boys and Girls Club of Union County received 10 computers from EAF.

Russell Triolo, the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Union County, said that the donation "means everything."

"It really means a lot to our kids," he said. "They don't really get a lot of access to computers in schools, and when they come here we help them with their homework everyday and a lot of times they'll use these computers for projects."

He said that many kids who are served through the Boys and Girls Club can not always afford personal computers. Access to computers provide the window to employment and college for children nowadays, he said.

Triolo said that what EAF is accomplishing is "wonderful."

"It does take an effort to refurbish them [computers]. They have a cost involved in updating the software and doing whatever they need to do for them to have a useful usage," he said. "I think it's a great thing what they're doing."

To learn more about the work of EAF, visit e-access.org.

Staff Writer Nick Muscavage: 908-243-6615; ngmuscavage@gannettnj.com