Hope Phones: 1 week’s trash
The Hope Phones campaign launched last Monday – 8 days ago. Thanks to you (colleagues, friends, family, acquaintances, bloggers, Facebookers, and tweeps) we’ve collected over 700 phones. What impact will this make?
In short, we’ll be able to provide up to 1,400 cell phones for healthcare workers in Malawi, Burundi, Uganda, Honduras, Bangladesh, and Lesotho. Once all 700 phones are processed by our recycling partner, I’ll give you a full breakdown of the phones’ values and which clinics will benefit.
Every phone matters. Each one will give another ~50 families a connection to clinicians and clinic resources. Malawi’s average family size was 5.5 in 2006 — in a little over 1 week, what would have been trash could pull another 385,000 people into FrontlineSMS:Medic programs. Phone donors are doing more good than they know – check out a recent post on TrackerNews: “Phone Riff: Hope Phones, Healthy Texting, Conflict Minerals, Ecological Intelligence, Blue Sweaters and Doing the Right Thing.”
Clinics benefiting thanks to Hope Phones donors
There’s still a lot of work to do, and the Hope Phones campaign isn’t going anywhere. In the 8 days since Hope Phones launched, Americans have discarded more than 3.5 million phones. If we recycle just 0.5% of next week’s phones through Hope Phones, we could provide tools enabling better healthcare for 9.9 million people.
You can help. Just spread the word, and toss your old phones in the mail — one email to friends and family, one tweet, one conversation with a coworker on a lunch break. Check out the map below to track Hope Phones collection sites and partners. Email info@hopephones.org to get involved. If you’d like to start up a program at your school or workplace, we’d love to hear form you.
- Hope Phones collection centers (click to view)
Thank you to everyone who helped launch this campaign.
This is awesome! I hadn’t heard of this way to recycle old cell phones. I will certainly think about passing this information on with my website.
Thank you, Amy! Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Best wishes,
Josh and the Hope Phones team
I have landed on this site courtesy of a twitter link. As a citizen of Malawi, which is one of the countries that are benefiting from this exercise, I would like to commend you guys for these efforts. I will make sure that I write a post about this campaign on my blog in the next 24 hours.
God bless you tremendously.
[...] Motivated by success in Malawi, Nesbit and his friends now want to scale up the project and duplicate it in Bangladesh, Burundi, Honduras, Uganda, Lesotho and additional clinics in Malawi. They need lots of phones in order to achieve this. They need your help to collect phones for clinics and community health workers who need them most. The Hope Phones campaign which was launched last Monday has now collected over 700 phones. [...]
where in Raleigh? I have five or six phones. Will you wipe the memory?
If anyone in Toronto has some to send off, I’m sending a box at the end of June. Get in touch via email: katejongbloed@gmail.com
@Jennie – if you visit http://www.hopephones.org, you can print a free shipping label and throw a box in the mail. Many thanks!
@Kate J – thank you for spearheading collection in Toronto; your help means a lot.
@Clement – I greatly appreciate the blog post, as well a your readers’ comments!
I like your blog
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