How an innovative, free program bridges the digital divide, encourages transformative learning, and builds skills in the Downtown Eastside.
By Geoff D’Auria, Nov. 30, 2024
Mike McNeeley didn’t know what to do.
His phone screen was black. No juice. A brick, as they say, sitting on the portable, grey table in the gym at the Carnegie Community Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Sometimes, if he held the plug firmly, a small charge trickled through—but not for long. This time, plugged into a portable charger on the table, the battery wouldn’t charge past three per cent.
Mike is a community member who contributes to a local magazine, Megaphone, whose editorial mission is to “amplify marginalized voices.” He has a new phone but needed to get important files off this old one.
“It’s three years of notes, scripts and photographs,” he said, a tone of worry in his voice.
Mike is one of about 20 people at this particular Pop-Up Tech Café, an innovative and free digital literacy program only made possible by the ongoing generosity of donors.
At various locations around the Downtown Eastside, community members come to these sessions with questions, sometimes lists of them, about personal technology. Community ambassadors or UBC student volunteers support them to find answers, like the ambassador looking at the charging port on Mike’s phone.
“I think it’s your charging port, Mike,” says Vivek the community ambassador who’s just come from helping someone else figure out why his laptop wouldn’t connect to his home Wi-Fi. (It was defaulting to his phone as a hotspot and gobbling up valuable phone data.) Ambassadors like Vivek are peer educators who hone their teaching, leadership, and tech skills as they support people at the cafés.
Started as an experiment in digital literacy a decade ago, these sessions have become popular community meeting places where people build their technical skills and students have transformative learning experiences. The program has also become a model for other organizations around the Lower Mainland.
For Mike, who has been coming to Tech Cafés on and off for years, the need for digital support like this in the Downtown Eastside has been essential.
“Just the basic ability to stay in touch with family or make appointments with doctors and so on became impossible,” he said, describing what happened when pay phones were removed from the neighbourhood years back, adding “I don’t think a person can exist without a phone in the Downtown Eastside.”
Transformative student learning
If it’s not Vivek helping out, it could be Esther Roorda. Esther is a UBC student doing her PhD in the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Esther’s plan for her PhD had been to study, in her words, “Field programmable data arrays… Re-configurable hardware that can be used to build high performance accelerators for machine learning.” Translation: back-end high performance computing for things like data centres. That’s what she studied as part of her master’s program and had started studying as part of her PhD.
But that changed after she started volunteering with the Tech Café program.
She said she wanted to volunteer at first simply as a way to learn more about Vancouver beyond the UBC campus and to make connections after the COVID-19 shutdowns. She was also interested in teaching and education around technology.
But at Tech Cafés, Esther started noticing something. “Tech Cafés helped me see how much the industry and research priorities aren’t necessarily aligned with community priorities and how there’s not much consultation or thought about broader social impact during the design process.”
Esther said she has since completely shifted her research focus to computer literacy in diverse communities as a way to promote socially and environmentally conscious computing.
She is now a part of the UBC Public Scholar Initiative investigating ways to develop the community-level skills needed to repair personal electronics, to bring community perspectives into electrical and computer engineering curriculum, and to work with diverse communities to better understand the challenges and goals they have when using, maintaining, and repairing personal electronics. The Public Scholars Initiative supports PhD students whose research has the potential for tangible public impact.
In other words, in a field that traditionally partners with industry, Esther is looking for ways to bring communities to the table. And whether it’s design or repair—flip sides of the same coin—it starts with listening.
“In a lot of cases, it’s not a one-size-fits all,” she said of the problems she’s encountered at Tech Cafes. “Every situation is different.”
In Mike’s case, the Tech Café team suggested he find a charging mat, a low-cost solution that allowed him to charge the phone without a cable and without investing good money into an old phone.
Meeting people where they are
Listening to the user is a sentiment William Booth would applaud. Retired in 2023, William was the Outreach Coordinator with the Downtown Eastside Literacy Roundtable, a coalition of adult educators and organizations. He and Dionne Pelan, the Digital Literacy Coordinator at the Learning Exchange, launched the Tech Café program after first collaborating on an app.
“There was no model for this. This whole thing was evolutionary and revolutionary,” he said, explaining how the idea emerged as they were developing the LinkVan app, which offers current information about available services like shelter beds, food, medical and legal services in the Downtown Eastside. A UBC student volunteer built the app, but the app design emerged out of a participatory design process that community ambassadors led with other community members. These “conversations at the interface,” as some called them, became a model for Tech Cafés.
“It’s to Dionne’s credit that she realized back in the day that it wasn’t enough to build the technology, we had to support people to use it, too,” William said. “She organized the first Tech Café in Oppenheimer Park… I remember Dionne walking through the park and people yelling out questions. People wouldn’t want to come into the Tech Cafés at first but they wanted help, which showed we needed to go to them.”
Eventually they were hosting Tech Cafés at partner locations across the Downtown Eastside, including the Oppenheimer Park Field House.
In the beginning William said that he and Dionne had to convince others that technology was something that needed to be seen through a literacy lens. “We really influenced the awareness in the larger community of the relevancy and importance of digital literacy for people in low-income situations.”
Now community organizations around the Lower Mainland are coming to them for advice on setting up their programs. When they do, William and Dionne advise them to listen first to what their communities want.
A trusted community hub
Returning two weeks later with a fully charged phone, Mike worked with Esther to move the files to his new phone, which they had to first reset. When the files were finally moved, his sigh of relief was audible.
“Sometimes with the Tech Café,” Esther said in an earlier conversation, “the problems are complicated and I can’t solve them. But sometimes the problems are pretty quick and simple and so it feels like I did something useful that day.”
Tech Café Fast Facts:
From August 2023 to August 2024:
- 900 visits
- 119 sessions
- 240 hours
- 9 community ambassadors
- 2 volunteer and 3 course-based students
- 4-6 locations
Partner locations in 2024:
- Embers Eastside Works
- Carnegie Community Centre
- Oppenheimer Park Field House
- Ray-Cam Co-operative Centre
- WISH Drop-In Centre Society
- Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House
- Gathering Place Community Centre
- Binners’ Project
- Migrant Workers Centre
- Union Gospel Mission Summer Connects
She added that the best moments are sometimes the simplest—helping people get in touch with their families, listening to their stories, learning more about the interesting projects in the Downtown Eastside, and helping people take a step forward in their lives.”
For Mike, reflecting on the value of these free sessions, “It’s tech support that people in the Downtown Eastside can trust and afford.”
The UBC Learning Exchange and the Downtown Eastside Literacy Roundtable partner to deliver Pop-Up Tech Cafés and the LinkVan app. Tech Cafés happen multiple times per week at locations across the Downtown Eastside. See the monthly calendar on the UBC Learning Exchange website for the latest information. To volunteer, contact Dionne Pelan. Donate to the UBC Learning Exchange here.