Outlook
For those who have been wondering what I do with my time when I'm not working with Citizen schools or on the Gateway program this is what I'm dealing with.
From the malden Observer Dated 12/7/2006
Net Loss
For low-income residents, recent immigrants or tech-illiterate job seekers, lacking access to the Internet – or lacking computer know-how altogether – can mean the difference between finding lasting employment and landing on the dole or in poverty forever.
Until recently, Malden’s Cyber Café was one-stop shopping for basic computer skills courses, free Internet access and links to job placement. They serve more than 80 members each day, and work closely with job placement agencies in the area.
But now, with their funding dwindling, the five-year-old resource center may be forced to close.
“We’ve gotten several grants over the years, but our partners’ ability to contribute is waning,” said Loretta Kemp, deputy directory of Tri-CAP, the anti-poverty agency that helped found the Cyber Café in 2000. “We do provide a service for the city, but we get no compensation from them. We’ve been kind of treading water.”
The lease for the nine-computer Cyber Café, which sits at the corner of Main and Pleasant streets downtown, is up in January. Anne D’Urso-Rose, assistant director of Cyber Café’s founding partner MATV, said finding funds to renew the lease is the café’s primary survival goal this winter.
“To pay the rent is really the funding need right now,” she said. “We need a temporary and a long-term solution. We need to extend our $17,000-a-year rent. There’s still a lot of people in this community who don’t have access to computers.”
According to George Moriarty, executive director of the Career Place, free Internet and computer cafes often succumb to a loss of funding after the initial burst of donations and volunteerism.
“It’s not unusual that we’re in this dire situation,” said Moriarty, who pointed to other cyber cafes in Massachusetts that have failed in recent years because of similar funding gaps. “You do quite well the first five years, but you really need to make that transition. Things start coming due, and leases expire. We fulfilled our mission, but we’re in the position where we need to transition to a more stable funding base.”
The Cyber Café has already begun charging $5 for their computer training courses, and implemented a 10-cent-per-page printing fee to offset their deficit. But café volunteers said they don’t want to tap their patrons’ wallets to stay afloat, because the population they serve often can’t spare the costs – and many might stop coming because of it.
Claire Murray of Murray Learning Associates, another Cyber Café partner, said the café is looking for new grants, private donations and matching corporate gifts as future funding sources. Until then, she and others are appealing to the residents of Malden to save their free Internet resource.
“People can give directly to this organization to support it. People at this time of year are into giving, and it would be a tax-deductible donation,” she said. “We are looking to see if we can find some matching donors. And we need some volunteers to take on some responsibility.”
Kemp said the café is looking for volunteers, particularly those willing to cultivate and work with teen volunteers, to give several regular hours a week toward staffing the center and doing data entry.
To more information on volunteering, taking a computer course or helping to support the Cyber Café, visit the center’s Web site at www.maldensquare.org, or call 781-393-0574.
To give a tax-deductible donation to the Cyber Café, make a personal check payable to Tri-CAP with “Cyber Café” in the memo line. Checks can be dropped off or mailed to Tri-CAP’s Malden office at 110 Pleasant St. To contact Tri-CAP, call 781-322-4125.
