Charity tech partnership will fight ‘vicious cycle’ of crime
The charity Rebooted has joined forces with IT firm Getech to keep vulnerable children in education and calls on support from business leaders
A charity which provides the children of prisoners with refurbished laptops has secured a major partnership.
Rebooted, a charity founded last year in Cambridge by entrepreneur James Tweed, has joined forces with IT firm Getech to collect old company laptops, wipe them and reinstall with educational content aimed at children struggling in education and facing exclusion.
The initiative is focused on families with a parent in prison - a group with a higher than average likelihood of exclusion and poor educational outcomes.
Tweed, who also runs Coracle, a company that supplies laptops to inmates for educational purposes, said the charity is battling a vicious cycle of poor education, family breakdown and crime.
“Exclusion from education is a driving factor towards a life going off the rails. Someone leaves education, struggles to find work and starts to break the law. Indeed, many prisoners were excluded from school so there’s a very clear link.
“Life for families when a parent is inside is also very precarious. Children suffer and often struggle at school, don’t attend or risk being excluded.
“So what we have here is a vicious cycle. A parent goes to prison, a child is excluded and then they ultimately end up going to prison, too.”
Tweed now wants businesses to support Rebooted’s work by donating out-of-date laptops. These will be sent to Getech, securely wiped to the highest data protection standards before being reloaded with Chrome OS Flex, a cloud-based operating system that extends the life of old tech.
The devices will then be distributed to families where a parent is currently serving a custodial sentence.
“With the Windows 10 operating system coming to the end of its life, now is the perfect time for businesses to offload unused hardware and help address a serious social issue in the process,” said Tweed.
“Every child belongs in education, and in today’s world that requires digital access and literacy.
“Businesses can help us to fight a major societal problem simply by donating their old laptops for someone else to use.”
Richard Maclean, managing director of Getech said he wanted to work with Rebooted to help break the cycle of detention and reoffending.
"Getech is excited to partner with Rebooted on this initiative.
"This collaboration represents a significant step forward in trying to close a clear digital gap that will deliver clear and measurable results to families trying to break the cycle of prison detention and reoffending.