[M]any refugees and other new Americans need computer skills to fill their most basic needs, like finding a job, hunting for an apartment, or communicating with distant relatives.
A South Burlington nonprofit is striving to meet this need with a dozen newly purchased laptops and a cadre of local business mentors.
Technology for Tomorrow, or T4T, has hired an executive director and created a mobile computer lab. It’s offering classes to anyone who needs education in the area of STEM — the shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
The group, largely funded by one local anonymous donor, is holding open houses Dec. 7 and Dec. 8 to reach more members of the community who need STEM training and education. Its targets include homeschoolers, refugees and other newly arrived people, and seniors.
Bjorn Norstrom, T4T’s one paid employee, said he talked to new arrivals to the United States to find out what technology skills would be most helpful to them, and learned that most need access to basic amenities like email, Facebook messenger, state of Vermont websites, Craigslist, libraries and online banking. He has enlisted engineers and others from local companies who want to help teach.
Norstrom, a former middle school teacher who travels with a mobile lab including 10 laptops when he teaches classes, said he likes T4T because he sees such a great need for its services.
“It’s uncharted territory,” he said. “Nobody is doing this from a nonprofit or for-profit perspective. It’s a wide-open field, with a lot of opportunities that are really cool.”
T4T got its start in 2012 when its board members started teaching computer skills in senior centers and saw their class enrollments grow rapidly. The group also tried to serve the prison population, but there wasn’t much interest, said board member Mike Maslack, a former IBM employee.
The nonprofit makes money from paid classes and tutoring, and from tech consulting services that Norstrom provides. It’s opening a service it calls the “STEM Academy” to work with middle school and high school students. Norstrom said the group has worked with about 500 people and 25 organizations in the last six months in Williston, Essex, Milton, Burlington, Winooski, South Burlington and Shelburne.
Giving refugees and other new Americans a means to go online gives them the access they need to find work and connect with others, said Raichle Farrelly, an assistant professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at St. Michael’s College who also teaches English to refugees and has had Norstrom work with her refugee students on computer use.
Farrelly said some of her students work in assisted living facilities and have to use computers to enter patient information. Others need to learn how to search for jobs or apartments online. It also helps people connect in other ways.
“There’s a role for it to play in terms of confidence building and letting them be part of what everyone else is part of,” Farrelly said. “They don’t have computers at home, maybe, but this way people are acknowledging they are smart and capable enough to work on computers and use technology.”
