Charity spotlight: Screen Share UK
At A Good Thing, charities are what drive us forward. We were set up in order to boost brilliant UK charitable causes that are delivering powerful and much-needed work right across the country. We knew there can be a lot of wealth (and waste) sitting within businesses, and we also knew how great the need was within the UK charitable sector.
We currently have thousands and thousands of brilliant good causes registered with the A Good Thing platform, but we’d like to pick just one on this occasion to highlight: Screen Share UK, the leading digital inclusion charity for refugees in the UK.
Screen Share collects disused IT assets from companies, repairs and refurbishes them, and then distributes them to UK refugees nationwide.
Who are Screen Share UK?
We caught up with Alessandra Anzante, Partnerships Manager at the charity, who told us a bit about its origins:
“Screen Share began in our founder Moses’s bedroom during the pandemic, alongside his day job at another refugee charity. When everything moved online, and his refugee clients weren’t able to access basic services, educational courses or look for work, Moses made it his mission to equip them with connected devices that had been donated by individuals and companies around London.”
Things have moved fast for the charity, as Alessandra told us:
“We have grown significantly in the last year and have a staff team of nine now. We are in a much larger office space, and offer laptop-refurbishment workshops during which refugees are taught to refurbish tech. They then go on to become Screen Share volunteer “techies”, supporting our technical operations and distribution.”
Alessandra told us that Screen Share is now working at scale and creating a huge impact:
“No one else is doing this on a nationwide scale. Each month we receive an average of 500 applications for support from refugees across the country, and have over 150 charities on our waiting list who require Screen Share’s services to support their own refugee clients.”
There are similarities between how Screen Share and A Good Thing operate: clearly both are championing a ‘circular’ model, whereby things do not reach the end of their life and simply get discarded. We talked to Alessandra about how her charity goes about engaging businesses:
“You really need someone internally within a company to be spearheading and championing circular initiatives like Screen Share or A Good Thing. Engaging with Screen Share provides firms with a great way to create social value: we produce social impact reports for donors, plus some very moving case studies about the device recipients – stories that really detail the change created by the device having been donated.
Screen Share UK and A Good Thing in partnership
Screen Share only set up its account with A Good Thing a few months ago, but the team has already seen the benefits of being part of the platform:
“A Good Thing has been a major source of multiple donations of furniture to us at Screen Share. The greenery we received has also made a real difference: we recently moved into a new office space which was very plain and in need of some decor. The greenery really helped liven up the place! A Good Thing is a fantastic initiative.”
When Screen Share initially submitted its request for the foliage, it told us:
“We currently have a room that’s a bit bare… We’re shortly having a donor filming a workshop, and some of the foliage would really add to the view – rather than all of us bringing our home plants in for the day, as is currently planned!”
Another recent match for Screen Share was with a mobile charge-and-sync unit, which allowed the charity to charge more than one device at a time when doing bulk updates, and to prepare devices to be delivered.
Some lockable storage cupboards were also put to great use by the charity, as it explained when it submitted its request for this furniture:
“We’re reaching a point where we need extra fire-safe storage for our computers, and we could do with a few of these cabinets. They would really help us make sure that we keep as many of our donations locked up as possible.”
And the very first offer Screen Share was matched with, way back in 2022, was desktop PCs. In its request for these, it told us:
“We have a few people on our waiting list requiring PCs and we currently have no PC donations. All the tech that we distribute goes to helping forced migrants access vital services and further their education.”
How to support Screen Share UK
We hope Screen Share UK will continue benefiting from what A Good Thing can offer for a long time to come. If your company has disused tech and would like to learn more about donating it to Screen Share, you can visit the website or email Alessandra directly ([email protected]).
