Naperville teens give old computers a second life
The Power Up Project has been refurbishing donated machines for local families and nonprofits since 2018, run entirely by high schoolers.
Somewhere in a Naperville basement, a team of teenagers is doing what most adults only promise to do with the old laptop in the closet. They are fixing it and giving it to someone who needs it.
The Power Up Project began in 2018, when a group of Naperville North High School students wanted to combine their love of technology with philanthropy. Naperville Magazine names Eric Chen as the founder. Since then it has grown to draw members from other area high schools, and Positively Naperville reports about 20 students on the current team, including students from Naperville Central, Neuqua Valley and IMSA.
The pitch is simple. “We collect, refurbish, and donate computers to help out our local community,” then-president Jai Gupta told NCTV17 in 2024.
The sourcing is where the students get inventive. Outreach director Kyle Wang told NCTV17 the team researches local IT companies and advertises on Nextdoor to find donors. Naperville Magazine reports the past school year brought in 120 computers, 70 monitors and 120 smartphones from sources including a school district IT department and a public library. The year before, Aurora Public Library alone gave 100 computers and monitors.
Then comes the bench work. Each machine is assessed for age and condition. Anything older than about a decade is usually recycled. The rest get new storage drives, memory and a fresh operating system, which Naperville Magazine says takes about 15 minutes per computer.
The output has gone to groups such as the Naperville Youth Club, Plant Chicago, Literacy DuPage and Families Helping Families Chicagoland. Positively Naperville says the project has donated more than 400 computers over seven years, about 100 of them in 2025. It also describes individual recipients, including a person returning to community college for a GED and an unemployed person preparing a resume.
Wang, now president, hosts the weekly work sessions in his basement. Positively Naperville reports that leaders spend about $30 of their own money on accessories for each donated desktop that needs new parts. The group also joined the Illinois Tech Reuse Network, which the state’s Office of Broadband Initiative invited it to form with other organizations.
“This has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done in high school,” Wang told Positively Naperville.
Donations of PCs, laptops, tablets and consoles are accepted through the group’s website. Printers, scanners and fax machines are not.
