Welcome to the blog for Puentes y Estrellas del mar! This project uses community informatics (CI) to combine research, teaching, and community engagement to develop a virtual service infrastructure to bridge social services across different sectors for Latinos in Champaign County.
This project grew out of two interrelated ideas necessary for community action: building structures and sustaining efforts. First, communities can and do build structures to meet the needs of its members. The puentes (bridges) part of this project strives to support existing community efforts by collecting local knowledge, bringing together people who care about the needs of Latinos, and developing a platform for networking, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. Second, communities need to plan for sustainability so that responsibility for on-going efforts does not reside in one person or a small group of people. In the end, community-wide efforts bring about lasting change when everyone is involved. So, like an estrella del mar (starfish), the networks are self-rejuvenating.
By embedding the project within the existing organizational structures of the Latino Partnership of Champaign County, NFP (LPCC) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the long-term sustainability of the virtual service infrastructure can be realized. Moreover, the involvement of two units in particular: the School of Social Work and The Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS) Community Informatics Initiative (CII) have created an opportunity for menaingful community engagement between students and the wide Campaign-Urbana community. This project moves beyond using information technology solely as a repository of knowledge. Instead, it sees technology as a starting point (and maybe even a resting point for reflection) to facilitate community building and problem-solving at the local level.
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