The National Institute of Senior Centers (NISC) will present its Public-Private Partnership Award to Cellular Recycler, which has deployed resources to help senior centers raise unrestricted dollars through cell phone recycling. During the first six months of this partnership, almost 3,000 cell phones have been recycled and $10,000 dollars raised for senior centers.

This award recognizes outstanding, innovative, and collaborative efforts of the private sector to advance the senior center field and its work. NISC will present the award during the joint conference of NCOA and the American Society on Aging on March 7, 2007, in Chicago.

Cellular Recycler was established in 2003 with the mission to refurbish and resell the 700 million used cell phones in the United States, while keeping the remainder out of the nation’s landfills. The company focuses on the creation and adoption of widespread cellular recycling programs for nonprofit organizations, businesses, and schools.

Collected cell phones are either refurbished (after the existing memory has been "flashed" from the phone to remove any history or stored information) or broken down into metals and plastics and properly recycled. 

Since its inception, Cellular Recycler has established partnerships with some of the nation’s largest businesses and major community-based organizations, including the American Cancer Society, MetroPCS, and Sony Ericsson. One such example is the American Cancer Society’s Atlanta chapter, which raised $32,000 in their first year of fundraising alone.

In 2003, a senior center in Boone County, AR, began collecting used cell phones as a fundraising project for no other reason than that the senior center president Sylvia Wright was the grandmother of Cellular Recycler’s founder Brandon Greenhaw.  Their success for innovative fundraising was recognized by the Senior Programs of Arkansas, the state association for senior center professionals. Based on the excellent results of the Boone County senior center, soon many other senior centers began raising funds to support program operations through cell phone collection.

With ever increasing competition for funds, the rising cost of gas usurping program dollars and increasing demands for services, NISC viewed recycling as a means to help senior centers raise unrestricted dollars to augment services and programs for older adults across the country.  After a year of due diligence, NCOA approved this effort and during the first six months of launching this initiative (June 2006 through December), about 20 centers have collected almost 3,000 phones and earned close to $10,000 in funds to support their work.

NISC is pleased to recognize and salute Cellular Recycler for developing a Web site and supportive materials that help volunteers easily put together a fundraising campaign. Together, NISC and Cellular Recycler encourage businesses, corporations, and community members to take old phones out of their kitchen drawers and provide them to senior centers.

The value of collected phones is translated into dollars that support home-delivered meals programs, emergency funds for older adults or other senior center projects that improve the quality of life for older adults and meet important community needs.

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