Terrific little piece about our efforts in the December issue. We've posted the complete text below, but you can also link to it if it is still online.
Thanks to Choate and St. Luke's for their recent equipment donations, but we are also in need of financial help (we know, who isn't?) But any little bit helps.
Thanks again to all. Here is the article's text:
The Canaan Foundation
Tom Schultz hasn’t parked a car in the second bay of his garage on Tommy’s Lane in more than a decade. Along with kids’ sports gear, the bay is reserved for the twenty to fifty secondhand computers donated each month to the Canaan Foundation, the small but growing NGO he founded in 1996 to aid secondary schools in Kenya and Cameroon.
A longtime New Canaan resident, father of five and business executive, Schultz became interested in Africa while at Yale, and shortly after graduation he traveled to Meru, Kenya, to teach. “At some point I considered myself really fortunate,” he recalls, “and I felt that I owed something to somebody.”
While in Meru he met Silas Muriuqi, headmaster of Chugu Harambee secondary school. Although Schultz returned to the United States for graduate school and then law school, he remained involved in Muriuqi’s work and helped put a village boy through college. In 1996, while Schultz was visiting Muriuqi, the headmaster told him of the school’s desperate need for computers and asked for his help.
Schultz returned to New Canaan with a rekindled desire to make a difference, though his initial efforts were met with considerable resistance.
“People would say to me, ‘How do you know there’s electricity? How do you know they want computers? And finally, how do you know they’re interested?’” he says.
Undeterred, with his own funds he bought a dozen laptops, and on a return trip to Africa transported them as airline carry-ons wrapped in bubble wrap and duct tape to make them look like suitcases.
“Once we stuck the computers in schools and had pictures of happy faces in front of them,” he says, “it was much easier to raise donations.”
That was when the used units began arriving at his house, largely by word-of-mouth, from diverse sources including Princeton University, Norwalk Hospital and individuals as far away as San Francisco. A company in East Hartford donated warehouse space for storage and shipping.
Since then Schultz has returned to Africa many times — with volunteers from the community, including students and all five of his children — and the Canaan Foundation has sent more than 1,000 computers to some fifty secondary schools, including schools for the deaf and for children with HIV-AIDS.
As technology advances on a nearly daily basis, the schools’ needs have also changed. “Right now we have a crying need for laptops — Pentium 2 or better,” Schultz says. “Individual donors who have a laptop can mail it or drop it off at my house. If a business has pallet quantities, we’ll send a truck and bring them right to the warehouse. If people will help me that much, I’ll be happy to push them into Kenya and Cameroon.”
You can also read it here.
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