Community Organization Collaboration
Trinfo.Café’s has successfully developed collaborations with dozens of community organizations participating in the Smart Neighborhood Initiative. Trinfo.Café has been able to forge these relationships into a very powerful model. By providing technology training and programming services to members or clients of these organizations, the real winners are the participants, who gain access to entirely new world of information.
Currently, Trinfo.Café is providing keyboarding and introductory classes in Spanish to dozens neighborhood residents. Trinfo.Café provides professional development training in English and Spanish to any resident living in Hartford. Trinity students teach all of Trinfo.Cafe's classes, as well as develop new technology-based programs for community organizations.
Public School Collaboration
Building off the success of the Community Organization Model, Trinfo.Café began establishing relationships with community groups in neighborhood public schools. These organizations were running the schools’ Family Resource Centers or running after school programs. They were interested in supplementing their programming with computer literacy classes.
Trinfo.Cafe is partnering with the Montessori School at the Learning Corridor to provide afterschool technology programming to youths aging from 6-10 years old. The customized program, now in its 5th year, is called Tech For Tykes and is designed to be age appropriate and develop a broad range of basic technology skills.
The success of the Montessori collaboration opened new opportunities to extend similar programming to Organized Parents Make a Difference (OPMAD) and their summer program. For the last four summers, Trinity students have taught custom themed programs to over 200 youth in 4 neighborhood schools.
Supporting the Community Learning Initiative (CLI)
For three years now, Trinfo.Cafe has provided direct support to faculty who've integrated a CLI component into their classes. Even though Trinfo.Cafe was designed to be a community development program, today's Trinfo.Cafe is a bridge that provides access for Trinity students and faculty to access over 150 community organizations.
Spring 2007
During the spring semester, Trinfo.Cafe hosted students from four CLI classes. Three of the four classes integrated students into Trinfo.Cafe's Media Literacy and Digital Storytelling program for teens. The program was designed to have refugees from Africa and Latin America become media literate and produce their own video about their experiences in Hartford. Trinity students from Educational Studies participated as teaching assistants and observed the participating teens for their class assignments. Trinity students from a film class on Hartford helped lead sessions designed to teach the teens how to use the video and audio equipment. And students from a 300 level History course teamed up with participating teens and taught them basic research methods as they sought to learn about the situations and conditions that forced these refugees to leave their homelands. The fourth class was a Hispanic Studies class on Hartford where Trinfo.Cafe staff led class sessions in Spanish, as well as taught Trinity students how to upload their assignments to class' website.
Summer 2007
During the summer, Trinity students continued designing new technology-programs for youth and teaching in English and Spanish, at Trinfo.Cafe and in the community. A second group of teenagers from Hartford and Bloomfield participated in a redesigned media literacy program where the youth produced two videos - one on the perceptions of homosexuality in the Latino community (done in Spanish), and the other on various perspectives of the Iraq War. Additionally, Trinity students taught a variety of technology programs at a neighborhood recreation center and school.
For more information about these activities, please contact Carlos Espinosa at 860-296-7545 or via email at carlos.espinosa@trincoll.edu.
Trinfo.Café Programs & Services
Besides offering a broad range of computer literacy workshops, Trinfo.Cafe provides a host of other services including customized technology programs for community organizations, web design and maintenance, and consulting services. These fee-based services augment Trinfo.Cafe's free programs for residents and community organization. Please visit our website for more information.
http://www.trinfocafe.com/revision/htm/consulting.htm