How Rishi Padmanabhan’s Consortium Spreads Technological Education

Unlike many of his other friends within the Irvine community, Rishi Padmanabhan loves to make devices work. For as long as he can remember, Rishi Padmanabhan’s been prone to taking things apart and making them function again for no other purpose than to get the experience of fixing them. 

As an incoming high school junior at Irvine High, Rishi Padmanabhan still pursues the exact same interest. The rush of understanding how things work still holds the value that it did when he was six years old.

Now, however, he’s channeled the passion differently, creating The Irvine Repair Consortium. Rishi Padmanabhan, founder, and president of The Irvine Repair Consortium has overseen technological literacy training, hands-on repair and restoration campaigns for businesses and locals in his area, and the facilitation of a functioning nonprofit organization.

The Irvine Repair Consortium teaches to anyone who wants to learn the basics of returning devices to working functionality. 

Rishi Padmanabhan’s goal is to share his love for technology with as many people as he can. 

First, he and his team take their new students through training, teaching them how to recognize certain flaws in devices, get the parts to remedy them, and complete the restoration in a timely manner. They provide practice materials and old devices to work on as examples.

Then, the consortium finds broken devices on a variety of online forums and local outlets, fixes them, and sells them again through similar channels. To date, they’ve restored and flipped thousands of dollars in devices.

After, though, the profits don’t go back to Rishi and his team. All proceeds are donated to local Orange County charities.

Rishi Padmanabhan has noted:

“Our mission isn’t about profit. It’s about education. We’re frequently innovating new lectures, programs, and activities for our members to learn from. I think that being able to fix a broken thing is extremely important, especially as we’re seeing technology become a bigger part of our normal lives.”

The Irvine Repair Consortium works on a large array of devices. Basically, anything with a screen. Still, however, Rishi Padmanabhan finds his favorite devices to be the ones that built his passions in the first place: the Ipads and Iphones that he’s been fixing since the age of nine.

Rishi Padmanabhan hopes to continue working with The Irvine Repair Consortium as he finishes high school.

The Irvine Repair Consortium’s work can be found on their website and Instagram page. Rishi Padmanabhan’s Instagram is also linked here.