Lockdown laptops - schemes in Gloucestershire?

[aoakley]

Hi folks. I'm refurbishing old donated laptops for locked-down / isolating pupils at Tewkesbury secondary school and its affiliated primaries. Goal is to help families that don't quite qualify for the existing government/schools scheme, the borderline / squeezed middle / just-about-managing etc. For example I have provided for a girl whose single mum "works too many hours" to qualify for the government scheme, and a child whose dad's employer went bust and suddenly that family finds themselves skint in reality whilst doing okay on paper.

http://www.cotswoldjam.org/lockdown/

I know there is a similar scheme in Winchcombe:

https://www.facebook.com/WAMYouth/photos/1847050492123705

If anyone knows of similar schemes in other local areas, please let me know, as I get asked a lot, and I can't refurbish all old laptops for everyone everywhere. Alternatively if anyone wants to start such a scheme, e.g. for Cheltenham or Gloucester, I have some hints / lessons learned:

http://www.cotswoldjam.org/lockdown/details.php

Also, I am replacing HDDs with donated brand-new cheapo SSDs (Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop on PC only needs 6GB so a £15 60GB SSD works a treat), and now have accumulated quite a pile of old HDDs (more than 20 at last count). I've wiped/reformatted the HDDs with FreeDOS but as we all know that won't stop a determined hacker from recovering data, and I suspect there is a fair bit of personal data on these old HDDs.

Once lockdown is over, Andy J has kindly volunteered to take an angle grinder to the platter of each, although I thought that might make for a fun post-lockdown event at the space when this is all over, if anyone else wants to assist!