Nancy Jo Craig’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Nonprofit Computer Refurbishment

Each year the International Computer Refurbishers Summit awards a lifetime achievement award. This year the award went to Nancy Jo Craig who runs the nonprofit Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council (CACRC) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was not an easy road for Nancy. A short time after she took over a small troubled computer refurbishment nonprofit - hurricane Katrina hit.

To be sure, Nancy Jo Craig is an accomplished woman. She is a poet, an environmental activist, and a nonprofit management expert with a masters degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. When she ran the Nature Conservancy in Louisiana, 200,000 acres were set aside. After she mentored the Foundation For Friends of Nature in Bolivia, a million acres of natural habitat were put in to public trust.

Coming Back Home and a Challenge of a Lifetime

By 2004 she had come back to her hometown of Baton Rouge and was working as a management consultant to a failing nonprofit. She was helping the board to decide to either close Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council or reorganize it. They persuaded her to run the place long enough to get it back on its feet. It was a lucky thing they did. In August of 2005, she had barely begun getting things in order when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck.

All of southern Louisiana had been hit. Thousands of people were pouring into Baton Rouge. The city ballooned to twice its original size in a matter of days. The electricity was out for week. Volunteer techies had set up an online people finder database, and relief agencies desperately needed computers so refugees in shelters could search for their loved ones. CACRC suddenly became the most famous refurbisher in the country. They needed a capable person in charge.

The Inundation

Places like TechSoup and the National Cristina Foundation put out the word that donated computers were badly needed in Louisiana, and they came by the truckload. They came from Alaska, from ad agencies on Madison Avenue, from everywhere. Nancy Jo recalls that it was a mess. Actually the biggest need was for laptop bags to serve as suitcases for refugees.

CACRC quickly scaled up to meet the computer needs of relief organizations, and then schools that opened up, and also low-income families. All the equipment went out at no cost because of financial donations. Nancy Jo notes that CACRC became a as much a service organization as a recycling operation as a result of the Katrina work. The organization looks for opportunities to serve disadvantaged communities wherever it can. Nancy Jo's and CACRC's work in frontline disaster relief was featured in Sundance Channel's "Big Ideas For A Small Planet" series.

Nancy Jo Craig receiving her lifetime achievement award from Willie Cade and Jim Lynch

The Years After the Catastrophe

It is now years later and Nancy Jo is still there. She leads a leaner, more efficient staff (who respectfully call her Ms. Nancy), and the demand for low-cost computers in southern Louisiana is still strong. They have capacity to turn out 12,000 PC’s per year, but CACRC now charges a nominal amount to schools, nonprofits, and low-income families. “It just works better that way.” She says.

Another reason Nancy Jo got the lifetime achievement award (called the Jim Lynch Award, named after yours truly) was for her work to represent the refurbishment field on Responsible Recycling (R2) technical advisory committee in its work to revise the R2 Standards for 2013. R2 along with E-Stewards are certification programs to insure that electronics recyclers and refurbishers practice proper e-waste disposal and worker health practices. CACRC is one of a just a few nonprofit electronics recyclers or refurbishers that are R2 or E-Stewards certified.

What’s Next for Nancy Jo

Nancy Jo says that  CACRC’s next frontier is to get computers and training to seniors. Their volunteers already do trainings in the libraries. She has just started sheltered work program to explore hiring developmentally disabled people in cooperation with ARC of Baton Rouge. She hopes to hire disabled people to do demanufacturing work in which they will take electronics devices apart to recover circuit boards and parts, and also separate the plastics and metals in these devices. She has already moved the organization in to this area of manual recycling and earns fully a third of the organization’s operating expenses from this area of work. CACRC is an social enterprise in that it does not need to rely on grants to keep operating.

She has also just published a book of poetry, “On The Advice of Rumi.” Her bio in the book sums her up: “She shares her life with happy dogs, grumpy cats, box turtles, and some rare humans. She is a practicing Buddhist who believes it would be worth reincarnating just to eat chocolate.”

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