Community learning IT grants from the Open Learning Partnership
Embrace centre
Voluntary and community organisation working in Haringey have benefited from a small grants scheme offered by the Open Learning Partnership.
The funding was for capital only. The applicant organisations had to be a registered charity and be able to show how their users would benefit, either directly or indirectly. The following organisations benefited from the grant.
HAVCO kindly agreed to put an announcement in its e-mail newsletter to Haringey community groups and the OLP received eight applications as a result. The spread of bidders in terms of both geography and type of organisation was quite wide. Whilst the emphasis was on providing equipment that would be used directly by learners we also wanted to support groups whose administrative functions formed a major part of their service delivery. Some of the funds would be used to install and configure the hardware and software where no local technical support was available.
Embrace UK wanted to upgrade their old Dell Dimension computers (used to run IT skills training sessions) to enable them to better respond to the memory hungry application programs and operating systems that have emerged since the original units were installed five years ago. They also needed to update some of their administrative machines to enable staff to work more efficiently.
Hornsey YMCA were in a similar position. Computers installed 9 years ago for a very successful UK Online centre were no longer able to meet the demands put on them by a new generation of Flash enabled on-line learning materials
The Council for Asian People in Wood Green had been receiving more and more requests for internet café type facilities from their users and put in a successful request for funds to purchase new computers and integrate these into their existing network. The new computers would also enable HALS to run classes at the centre which they had been unable to do before due to an insufficient number of machines.
CARIS (Haringey) Advisers found the scope of their outreach work limited due to a lack of a laptop. A new lightweight Dell Inspirion has changed this and has enabled staff to improve the scope of their out of office services to clients.
Haringey Women’s Forum wanted to be able to have shared access to common files and for staff to be able to hot desk without the expense of installing and maintaining a server. A set of new computers and a Network Attached Storage Device has achieved just this and staff can now work anywhere in the building without being tied to their computer.