⊕ Project / 01 · Student-run 501(c)(3) · 2025 - Ongoing

Tech Awareness Association.

A student-run nonprofit that hands people the screwdriver. Free repair workshops, senior tech support, and e-waste drives across Worcester County. We don't fix devices for people, we teach them to fix their own.

Role: Founder · Executive Director

Difficulty

Beginner friendly. No experience needed, walk-ins welcome.

Time required

Weekly workshops on a 12-part repair curriculum.

Tools

iFixit Pro Tech Toolkits and FixMats, at every seat.

iFixit FixMat · magnetic sorting surfaceShrewsbury, MA

Overhead view of an iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit, bit driver set, and a phone being repaired on a blue FixMat

A repair workshop, mid-session

QuickTime PlayerFileEditViewWindowSat 10:02 AM

workshop-room.mov

repair-bench.mov

southgate-seniors.mov

library-bench.mov

⊕ Timelapse reel · four workshops on fast-forward

⊕ E-waste diverted

1,545 lbs

⊕ Devices collected

442

⊕ People taught

100+

⊕ Towns

5 & counting

Every dead phone in a junk drawer is a lesson nobody got. Tech Awareness Association exists to teach that lesson: how a device comes apart, what actually broke, and why fixing it beats replacing it, for your wallet and for the landfill.

We run free weekly workshops out of public libraries in Shrewsbury, Grafton, Worcester, Marlborough, and Westborough, make regular tech-support visits to the Southgate Senior Center, and collect the community’s dead electronics at e-waste drives, then triage every device for resale, refurbishment, parts, or responsible recycling.

The standard at every table: teach, don’t fix-for. A volunteer’s hands stay off your device. Yours learn the repair.

How it started, step by step

Written the way we learned to write everything: as an iFixit repair guide.

STEP 1

The rejection

TAA was supposed to be a school club. Five months of meetings, proposals, and planning went into the pitch.
The answer came back no. The reason given: people wouldn’t be interested.
Diagnosis: the idea wasn’t broken. The housing was.

Part not found School club approval · out of stock

STEP 2

Reroute to the library

Instead of a club, we built a real organization and asked the Shrewsbury Public Library for a room.
First workshops: phone batteries, cracked screens, scam calls. Plain language, real tools, no signup required.
People loved it. The room kept filling back up.

Students repairing laptops and tablets together at a library table

STEP 3

Keep expanding

One library became five towns: Shrewsbury, Grafton, Worcester, Marlborough, and Westborough.
Southgate Senior Center joined the route for one-on-one senior tech support.
The workshops grew a 12-part curriculum: batteries, laptop maintenance, scam awareness, e-waste, AI basics.

Four students at a workshop table working through repairs with iFixit toolkits

STEP 4

Reassemble, bigger

Incorporated as a student-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2025.
iFixit came on as a formal partner. Granite Telecommunications donated a hundred-plus machines.
The school was wrong about one thing: people were interested.

A student documenting a phone repair on a blue FixMat

⊕ Repair logKeep screws on the mat

Everything opens the same way

Phones, watches, cameras, laptops. Whatever comes through the door goes on the mat, and its owner does the opening.

Driving a pentalobe screw on an opened iPhone — iPhone battery, pentalobe P2

Replacing a watch battery with a precision driver — Watch caseback, coin cell swap

A point-and-shoot camera opened down to its logic board — Kodak point-and-shoot, lens assembly out

Working inside an opened tablet with precision tweezers — Tablet connectors, tweezer work

Removing the bottom case screws of a MacBook — MacBook bottom case, ten screws tracked

A student deep inside a laptop chassis with tweezers — Laptop fan service, heatsink exposed

Three programs

A young student carefully disassembling a camera at a repair workshop

Weekly repair workshops

Shrewsbury · Grafton · Worcester · Marlborough · Westborough

Drop-in sessions at five public libraries on a 12-part curriculum: battery swaps, laptop maintenance, scam awareness, e-waste, and AI basics. You bring the device, we bring the toolkit, your hands do the work.

Senior tech support

Southgate Senior Center

Regular one-on-one visits. Slower pace, same standard: the senior holds the phone, the volunteer holds the patience.

An intake table stacked with donated phones, cameras, and a vintage radio

E-waste drives

Community collection events

Anything with a plug, under 50 pounds. Every device gets triaged instead of trashed.

A small team of high schoolers, no hauling vehicle, and a church parking lot. By 2 pm the lawn looked like the photo above: towers, TVs, camcorders, a drawer’s worth of dead phones from half the neighborhood.

Nothing goes straight to a shredder. Every device gets opened, assessed, and routed through the four bins on the right.

The hand-made e-waste drive flyer held up next to a donated desktop PC — The flyer that did the marketing

⊕ Triage: every device lands in one of four bins

Resell

Working, worth something. Sold to fund the programs. Every dollar is nonprofit revenue, none of it is personal income.

Refurbish & donate

Fixable with parts and patience. Wiped, repaired, and handed to a family or student who needs a working machine.

Harvest parts

Dead board, good screen. Stripped for the parts bin that keeps the refurbish pile alive.

Recycle

Truly done. Sent to a certified recycler instead of a landfill.

In progress right now: triaging the ~110 desktops and laptops donated by Granite Telecommunications, sorting by age and spec into these same four bins.

The partners

iFixit

⊕ Formal partnership

Months of cold emails went unanswered before one finally landed. It was worth every follow-up: iFixit is now a formal partner, with 30 Pro Tech Toolkits, FixMat magnetic screw mats, and their repair guides endorsed as the backbone of our curriculum.

Every photo on this page with a blue mat or a blue-handled driver in it exists because of them. So does this page’s color scheme.

30Pro Tech Toolkits

×FixMat screw mats

12Guide-based lessons

Inside a donated desktop tower awaiting triage

Granite Telecommunications

⊕ Granite Gives Back · triage in progress

Through the Granite Gives Back program, Granite donated roughly 110 used desktops and laptops in one shipment.

We’re mid-triage: sorting by age and spec into resell, refurbish-and-donate, and recycle. Resale proceeds fund TAA programs. We’ll publish where every machine ended up once the sort is done.

~110Machines donated

4Triage bins

The bit set

Five students, five different heads. The driver only works with all of them in the case.

Ronit Sharma

Executive Director

Tanay Mangal

Programs & Education

Nathan Anwin

Operations & Logistics

Suhaas Goluguri

Outreach & Community

Ekansh Jain

Finance & Impact

Bring us your broken stuff

Workshops are free and drop-in. Devices are tax-deductible. Volunteers get a toolkit and a table.

Visit techawarenessma.com @techawarenessma contact@techawarenessma.com

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