Toronto – Started in November of 2010, Compugen’s award winning Green4Good program has helped local charities such as Homeward Bound, operated by WoodGreen Community Services among others. And, now the program is branching out to help needy children in Africa.
The Green4Good program is an IT asset disposition solution that effectively eliminates the environmental impact of a business function that is critical to virtually every organization – the disposition of end-of-life IT assets – thus contributing to an organization’s ‘sustainable IT’ goals, while at the same time turning the net residual value of decommissioned IT assets into assistance for charitable organizations.
Conceived and managed by Steve Glover, the senior vice-president of Compugen Finance Inc., based in Richmond Hill, Ont., the program will now aid Project Childcare.
Project ChildCare Foundation (PCF) is the brainchild of Gary Morales back in 2004. The charity brings sustainable improvements to the lives of children in crisis and need through the provision of basic care such as food, clothing, shelter, medicine and education.
“Project Childcare is a charity that helps children in Africa and its run by Gary and his wife (Deborah Rodrigo) out of their house and in their spare time. My business is leasing and we are good at selling used computers. We find value in these assets that are maybe inconsequential to you but not for others in need,” Glover said at an announcement ceremony at Toronto’s Hunt Club.
Glover added that Green4Good to date has saved more than 150,000 PCs from the landfill and provided computing solutions to charities such as Friends of the Earth and the Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness (CCAA).
Rodrigo, who is executive director of Project Childcare along with working at Grant Thornton LLP, said Green4Good is a brilliantly conceived program that its time has come. “People in the business community when the work together can create some spectacular things,” she said.
Rodrigo added that Project Childcare is a small local charity with a global vision to help, heal and save children. “We want to ease and remove their suffering but we also need to make that sustainable,” she said.
Project Childcare sends 95 per cent of every dollar they get in donations to children in need, Rodrigo said. The money goes towards basic essentials such as food, water, shelter, medicine and education.
The charity has been working with community leaders in Africa such as Angela Gondwe Malik. Gondwe Malik founded the Kondwa Day Centre for orphans, a non-profit community-based organization in Zambia’s biggest city of Lusaka.
Gondwe Malik told the audience at the Hunt Club when she retired in 1997 her community was devastated by the HIV virus. The people of Zambia were dying and most doctors lost hope. These people decided they would rather die at home than in hospital and Gondwe Malik offered home care and provide for them through another community based organization called Community Home-Based Care (CHBC).
The HIV virus had another impact on the community. The children of these people with HIV dropped out of school and according to Gondwe Malik when a father dies the mother and all of her children go back to her home and live with the grandparents.
Because most of these families are large they could not all be fed.“I already had a structure in place with CHBC and after talking to others we had the money and the offices to help these children,” Gondwe Malik said.
In 2001, Gondwe Malik collected enough money to build a primary school for Grade 1 to 3 called Pakachele house. She has also founded the Seko house for vulnerable girls.
In 2009, she founded that Kondwa orphanage so that children would continue to go to school. “I myself am an orphan and they say that when you are an orphan you become everyone’s child; but then you don’t have a home. I know what that feels like. I can only dream for these children, but only you can made these dreams come true,” she said.
