Supporting residents who are offline or disconnected through lack of technology or skills
When? 2019 – 2023
The Big Local North Cleethorpes Digitally Disconnected initiative was our approach to helping local residents with technological advice and support.
This included:
Advice, training and support at groups around North Cleethorpes
Provision of public computers at 82 Grimsby Road
IT support to local charitable groups around North Cleethorpes
Recycling and donating laptops and devices to local residents
We mainly aimed this programme at older residents who we identified to have lack of computers, wifi, smart phones or the skills and knowledge to use them. But we were also at times helping families and school age children or other local residents.
Some of our approach was simply through sharing information and advice. We talked a lot about avoiding scams (which later evolved into our Scams/Fraud awareness programme as part of Keeping Older People Safe). But we shared information and articles about various basic ways to use technology, computers, phones and more.
We worked with local groups who supported older people or ran social groups so that we could identify residents in need. Andy, the VANEL IT administrator was actively visiting older people social groups to talk to them about IT and to answer their questions.
We assessed a number of people and worked with them to advise on cheap ways to connect to phones or broadband or to get their wifi or computers or apps and software working better. In a couple of cases we were able to directly support local residents to get online.
Our offices at 82 Grimsby Road had three public computers set up and we encouraged residents who were offline to visit us and use our computers (for things like job searches, NHS appointments, filling in official forms and so on).
We also had a programme to recycle computers and donate them where necessary. In the end these computers mostly ended up reaching families and school children who were disconnected rather than older people, but through this route we provided nearly twenty laptops and Chromebooks to local families. We were grateful to a number of local businesses and residents who donated us their spare devices which we were able to recycle and donate.
In 2019 we occasionally ran drop-in IT support sessions from local venues around North Cleethorpes including the Globe Cafe and Cafe Baraka.
Covid lockdowns in 2020 of course provided an even more important reason to support local people through IT and we found ourselves providing a lot more advice on Zoom and social media. At the time, the Hangout Youth Group (which was closed due to Covid) also ran some Digital Inclusion sessions for families and children who needed support.
Overall, our IT support programme was an experiment for Big Local North Cleethorpes to assess needs and see how we could help.
Slowly the advice on scams and fraud became more mainstream as part of the ongoing KOPS (Keeping Older People Safe) programme (working with VANEL). But we were also able to directly provide laptops, Chromebooks and equipment to around twenty local households and provided advice to many dozens of other local residents.
See also: Computers for Families