By. Michael Condra
How does human-I-T operate? With the help of Asana’s web based work application, we’re able to distribute more technology to those in need. human-I-T is able to operate smoothly while communicating with team and community members for receiving and distributing technology. Watch Asana’s interview with our CEO Gabe Middleton on how they’re helping us reach more people throughout Los Angeles.
What is human-I-T? At human-I-T, in a nutshell what we do is we basically take unwanted or inoperative technology of any kind. We refurbish that technology and we redistribute it out to low-income families other non-profits and veterans in need. It’s our mission to shrink what’s known as the “digital divide.” How we do that is we take unwanted technology from local businesses as well as the public and municipalities. It could be anything from computers all the way to enterprise grade technology like servers, cell phones, office equipment. Anything with a plug I like to say that needs power to run it. And we’re really just trying to disrupt the recycling business, because when it comes to E-waste, recycling is not the best option [for] reuse and re-purposing. We are able to then take that usable technology and connect it to a low income family who are often left behind in today’s digital age because they don’t have access to a working computer or internet.
How does Asana fit in? Asana is the cornerstone of what we do here at human-I-T. It’s how we communicate, how we keep track of inventory and even how we manage our customer relationships. We use Asana in every single department here at human-I-T and in every single way you can imagine.
Why did you switch to Asana? Before we used Asana as heavy as we do today we were really struggling to finding a good database to use for our model here at human-I-T. Which is about re-purposing and redistribution of technology and not just recycling and breaking down of commodities for weights, gold, and silver that’s inside the technology.
Custom Fields: A Game Changer When Asana came out with their custom fields about a year ago. That really changed the game for us and we found out ways to integrate a lot of other software into the Asana platform and now we actually can inventory every donation that ever goes through our warehouse and put it directly into Asana with the custom fields. So, it’s a pretty elaborate system when you look at Asana compared to what it looked liked in 2012. It’s been cool to see how Asana has evolved with how human-I-T uses it and I’m really thankful with what you guys are doing because without this platform we would be struggling a lot more, in my opinion. As soon as we started doing that. we were able to triple the amount donations that we took in because of the transparency and the flow of logistics of everything that we did became a lot more fluid and a lot faster. The best part of what we do is when we are able to have a distribution event. When we’re able to give away technology and internet to these low-income families it’s often time these families very first computer and the excitement behind them receiving the technology, getting the digital training that we provide as well as the low-cost internet that we provide them.
Bringing It Together We need to do a better job, not only for our environment side, but to produce less E-waste in the first place. But we need to do a better job at taking the E-waste problem and combining it with the digital divide problem. Put those problems together just to create one solution, that’s what human-I-T is all about. We’re here just to provide a platform of technology for anybody to pursue their dreams. Because you really need that internet and that technology skill to do something in today’s digital age. So, obviously there’s a lot of work that’s involved in getting the technology donated to us, then refurbished and ready to be reused and then tracking the distribution. And ever since we’ve been using Asana, not only have we been able to get more technology in the first place, but we’re also able to double the amount of technology we’re able to give away. Because we’re spending less time on the logistics and the communication and more time focusing on making sure we’re communicating with the community so that people know where we’re going to be, when we’re going to have an event and so on and so forth. How can you make an impact? Click here to learn more about our programs and see how you can help those in need by making a monetary or technology donation.
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