Come by and grab a t-shirt, we finally have them back in stock for $10!

After a generous donation of shelving from Ryan Co. during their move downtown, we are taking a bit of time to rearrange and replan our space in the recycling area. Please excuse the mess as the walls get their first coat of paint in years.  Thank you to Welna’s Ace Hardware for the great help picking the colors!  The plan is expected to take a few weeks but we see this having a great benefit for handling greater numbers of volunteers and material to recycle!

Free Geek will be closed Christmas and New Year’s Day to observe the holidays, please keep that in mind.

Have a great holidays!

Today is Give to the Max Day, we’re excited to have an introductory video to show you!

Please consider a donation to help us with our mission at our Give to the Max site.

We are happy to announce our store has been moved to a new area of the facility. This means more stock viewable, more stations to test gear before you buy, and fun things called windows, which we hear are nice.

But seriously, no running into the back caverns to find a computer, our entire stock is within reach finally. We’re happy to be able to serve customer’s needs better. This is all part of the plan to keep scaling to meet the community’s need for our mission.

Thanks to Art, Charlie, Eric, Todd, Dan, Karen, and more that pushed hard this past month to get our store moved and running again.

Unfortunately, we have to post about an update to the donation fees.

Ideally, Free Geek could process CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes) and printers for free. Due to changes in commodity prices we will be charging to accept these donations. We want to be open about these costs and why we are stuck charging them. To a certain amount, we keep working printers available to be reused, but due to storage and volunteer-power constraints, we end up recycling printers too.

We are already seeing costs of $300 per transaction with our recyclers to handle printers and CRTs.

The fees for CRTs are :

• <20″ $15
• 21-25″ $25
• >26″ $50
• Bare tube, broken CRT, or damaged plasma screens $15

And for Printers :

• Inkjets $10
• All-in-one $25
• Large printers $45

We feel this represents the ‘at cost’ by the pound rate we receive from our recyclers and will adjust these rates when we can to keep the costs to donators down.

We’re happy to be moving forward with a new look at freegeektwincities.org. Over the years we have accumulated a fair number of pages, which we will also be updating!

Some things to watch for in the coming weeks:

1. The ability to browse our current thrift store stock
2. More posts about new learning opportunities
3. Meeting minutes and Non-profit documents
4. Social media feeds and more ways to connect than ever!