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by Steve Ricci
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t’s a bright April morning at a Broad Street equity trading firm, just a few doors down from Manhattan’s New York Stock Exchange. Outside, the sun illuminates the narrow canyons of concrete that house the world’s richest financial centers. Inside, Neelam Mehta ’93 has a problem.
An assortment of 70 used Dell computers line the firm’s hallway floors and tables, casualties of a recent move to new office space. The firm has donated the computers to Mehta’s organization, Non-Profit Computing/Click-Aid, a charitable partnership that distributes computing technology to people in need. Her mission is to get the unwanted computers out of the building, into a truck, and uptown to a South Bronx distribution center, where they will be inventoried and prepared for shipment to a university in Mozambique. But there are complications. The building’s superintendent refuses to allow the computers to be moved during working hours because of insurance regulations, a detail the donor was to have worked out before arranging the pickup.
As she confers with members of the company’s staff, who in turn negotiate with building management, Mehta’s contracted moving crew waits tolerantly to begin hauling the computers down to the truck. She offers empathy to the crew and its foreman for the swelling midday traffic, the possibility of having to skip lunch, and the increasing likelihood that they’ve wasted hours of their time if permission to remove the computers doesn’t arrive soon.
Mehta pulls her cell phone from the handbag dangling from one shoulder and checks for messages while extracting some paperwork from the briefcase that hangs from the other shoulder. The truck is already half-filled with dozens of computers donated earlier in the morning by a Park Avenue insurance firm. If obtaining the Dell computers requires a return trip to Broad Street, the additional expenses—tolls, parking, gas, and crew time—will negatively affect her recovery costs. With each update from the company’s staff, she reaffirms her sincere gratitude for their donation and explains tactfully that a delay of hours or more might hamper her ability to get the computers to their intended destination.
Since she founded Click-Aid in 2002, Mehta’s professional life has been consumed by the complex, sometimes painstaking task of getting donated computers out of the United States for reuse in developing nations across the globe. A cum laude graduate of Emma Willard, she received her B.A. in economics from Wellesley College, and in 1997 accepted a position as an institutional sales and marketing analyst at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in Princeton and later in New York City. In 2004, she completed the Cross-Continent MBA program at Duke University, which permitted her to work while studying. A young, superbly educated graduate working in the finance capital of the world, Mehta was primed for a lucrative career.
But a greater passion stirred.
The child of parents who emigrated to the U.S. from India in 1970, Mehta has always been deeply connected to her family’s cultural heritage. Growing up in Delmar, New York, she learned to read, write, and speak Hindi and immersed herself in Indian dance, music, and literature. During her junior year at Emma, she wrote of herself, “Just as the roots of the old hemlock facing my house stretch far and wide across the earth, so do my own.”
An interest in helping developing nations like India grew throughout her education and was further cultivated at Wellesley, where she took as many courses as she could about international development. While working at Merrill Lynch during the surge of the dot.com industry, her attention was increasingly drawn to the disparity not only between nations with and without highly advanced technological abilities, but also within developing nations themselves.
“In the summer of 2000 our economy was doing so well; everything we were dealing with was technology, with a lot of Indian names behind it,” she recalls. “But much of the software was being exported [from India]. I wondered how it is possible that a country like India can create so much ingenious software, yet the majority of its population has no access to computers. Forget software; they don’t even have the hardware to run the software. There are so many people in that population who will never touch a computer.”
The digital divide aroused Mehta’s entrepreneurial instincts, and she began envisioning a business that would harvest functional but unwanted computers and redistribute them among poor communities, particularly on the international level. A mentor at Merrill Lynch suggested she
pursue the venture as a nonprofit organ-ization so that corporations would have an incentive to donate as a tax deduction. In 2001, she rented inexpensive office space near the United Nations and began doing research specifically focused on India, traveling to the country and observing a major bank’s donation of a computer lab to a municipal school in a low-income suburb. The experience, she says, gave her a better understanding of existing needs and how they might be met.
“There is a sense of connectedness among us all,” she told students during a recent assembly address at Emma Willard. “If others are suffering, it’s going to impact your resources unless you help them learn how to get their own.”
After returning to America she conducted local trial placements, obtaining some computer donations and distributing them to charitable organizations in New York City. She also took free courses at the Foundation Center, where she learned how to set up a nonprofit, write grant requests, and create a mission statement. In 2001, shortly after the attacks of September 11, she attended a Foundation Center presentation on technology and nonprofits, by John L. German, the founder and director of Non-Profit Computing, Inc., a respected New York-based philanthropic
organization that arranges computer donations, procurement, and logistics worldwide.
For 17 years, German had been doing what Mehta was dreaming. “So I kept bugging him,” she says, barely restraining a giggle.
A short time later, German, who networks extensively at the U.N., was visiting an associate at a nearby office and
happened to find Mehta sitting at a rented desk in the same room, working on the launch of her venture. They had a substantive conversation about their respective endeavors, and German remembers being impressed by Mehta’s determination to get her organization going
and the objectives she had in common with Non-Profit Computing (NPC).
“It was so clear that her visions and values, identity, and aspirations fit very well with what we were doing,” he said. “She was a person with a healthy, productive idea of what could be done, and she was devoting her time to trying to figure out how to do
it. Since 1984, I’ve had conversations with
many others who’ve had the same notion of working closely on a continuing, on-going basis with NPC. Most of those conversations go nowhere. Why was this one different? Part of the answer is her strong sense of dedication to a vision of how things should be, and the possibility that things can be better than they are.”
German asked Mehta to meet with him and Karen Prudente, executive secretary of the Women’s Division, General Board of Global Ministries, of the United Methodist Church, a key partner and supporter of NPC. Prudente had contacts with numerous organizations in developing countries that desperately needed computers. German and NPC had access to major donations of computers. What was needed was someone to oversee the operational connection: the intensive processing, coordination, and management required to get the computers from donor to recipient. Mehta had brought with her to the meeting a proposal to set-up a nonprofit organization called Click-Aid.
“That was a turning point meeting,” Mehta said. “We were able to put all of our forces together and make it happen.”
In early 2002, the newly formed part-ner-ship conducted its first mobilization. German had arranged a donation of com-puters by what is now the Queens Library system. Through the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Prudente had arranged funding for the computers to go to a variety of schools in Armenia via low-cost air freight on Alitalia. Now Mehta had her first opportunity to put Click-Aid into action on an international level. But the pilot run did not go as smoothly as she had hoped.
“So here I am driving a U-Haul truck with a senior executive of a major nonprofit foundation sitting next to me and helping me see out of a rear-view mirror on a highway going into South Jamaica [New York],” she says. “We had hired random packers—some volunteers, some paid—whoever we could get our hands on. We packaged everything quickly on the sidewalk of a rough neighborhood in front of the library’s central processing center. We didn’t even know what we needed. We had no tape guns and too little Bubble Wrap. When we got everything loaded into that truck, we drove up to the cargo loading area of Alitalia and waited in line behind all these massive trucks with our little 14-foot truck. Then they said, ‘Okay, unload.’ There were just two of us! We had to unload the entire truck ourselves and we were loading them onto pallets that kept breaking. It was a nightmare but it all got done. It was not very glamorous, but it was still a success and it felt great because it was the beginning.”
Over the past four years, Mehta has honed the laborious process to a tight, efficient operation; setting up trucking schedules, securing recovery costs, monitoring inventory, arranging for equipment testing, contracting labor, coordinating volunteers, and processing the elaborate regulations surrounding international shipments. Throughout, she traverses the delicate middle ground between donors’ needs and recipients’ needs with a blend of affable charisma, upbeat diplomacy, and dogged resourcefulness.
Because pickups necessarily incur cost, NPC and Click-Aid screen donors to ensure that potential donations are functional, useful machines. All equipment is thoroughly tested before being accepted for donation. Mehta is reluctant to use the word “obsolete” because even old computers, if they are working, can be useful to someone. Occasionally donated computers will still have outdated Pentium One processors, incapable of running many current versions of software, or of supporting the latest features of Internet connectivity, which severely limits their utility for recipients. In other cases, proffered donations may have parts that aren’t working or may have had parts removed.
“Sometimes I’ll get a difficult donor just trying to unload something, or someone trying to negotiate on the recipient side,” Mehta says. “But I explain that we have a fixed cost. We’re not a retailing commercial business and it’s not negotiable. If it was, we’d be paying out of pocket, and we can’t afford to do that. We have to recover our costs.”
It is this graceful yet resolute manage-ment style, German says, that makes Mehta so effective at her work.
“She has an amazing affinity for operations. Her willingness, even eagerness, to get into the details is just over the top,” he said. “Most people don’t have the patience to do that. She’ll go over things incessantly to ensure that they’re done right. Yet, despite this intense dedication, she is very charming with people. She gets them to come along with the program, even though it’s not their program.”
Since they united their efforts four years ago, Non-Profit Computing and Click-Aid have sent thousands of computers to schools, hospitals, job training centers, literacy programs, and people with dis-abilities. Refugee camps in Ghana and war-torn Liberian, schools in Tonga, employment-skills centers in Senegal, rural development initiatives in Madagascar, and people and groups in more than 20 other countries, including the U.S., have all received computers through their pipeline.
The recipient who most touched Mehta was a Pakistani woman who met German at a U.N. conference and described a number of initiatives she was working on, including a women’s shelter for victims of 2005’s devastating earthquake and a computer lab for a secondary school. But her chief objective was obtaining computing resources to aid a rescue mission for women targeted for honor killings, the tribal capital punishment practiced against females for perceived sexual or marital offenses.
“This woman happened to be from a place where my father’s family was from,” said Mehta, who had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan with family members who had not been back to the country in 60 years. “She started to speak Punjabi and I felt such a connection to her and her cause. You would not normally associate computing needs with rescue missions but they needed the computers in order to communicate with colleagues running similar missions throughout the country. This woman really won our hearts with her request. We wanted to make as much as possible happen for her and her organization.”
A day earlier a New York City investment bank had donated a small batch of laptops capable of running Windows XP, and NPC and Click-Aid were able to provide the computers to support the Pakistani woman’s mission.
As they continue to work together to equip and interconnect the world, both German and Mehta hope to better position Click-Aid to fully reflect its name, creating a public presence for online giving that will better serve its many programs and initiatives.
Despite much success in a short time, Mehta downplays her achievements with the same self-effacing aplomb she used in working to get the computers out of the equity trading firm’s building and off to Mozambique, preferring to focus on work yet undone.
“I wish we could do more,” she says with earnest exasperation. “There are so many needs.”
This Serving & Shaping column appeared in the spring 2006 issue of EMMA.
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