Building an Internet Bridge - Part 5 - Community Wellness and Health

Building an Internet Bridge – Part 5

Community Wellness, what does your Community Internet Network have to do with community health and wellness?

An Important part of the RAIN Network is our Central California Telemedicine Network. The Network coordinates Telemedicine Services to rural communities and low income urban areas not currently receiving regular Clinic or telemedicine services.

From the earliest days of our Community Internet projects, when the influence of the old BBS approach was still strong, there has been an organic understanding that one of the purposes of this new technology is to improve the quality of peoples lives, starting with improved Health and Wellness information access along with improved use of telemedicine as a means to ensure low income, seniior and family health care is always there, no matter how rural or how inner city.

RAIN Network’s highly innovative Rural Community Telemedicine Project puts its focus on the preparation of an effective Community and Neighborhood level Health Resource, with a strong focus on Health Information for schools, families, seniors and migrant farm workers. Special work on emerency preparation at the Community Level (for issues such as an avian flu pandemic) makes RAIN’s Rural Community Health Education and Telemedicine program very important. We work to establish a distance education program designed for K-12 Schools which will ensure access to vital school information as well as daily learning resources for student and family use in the event of school closures. The RAIN Telemedicine Network links over 24 clinics together and gives everyone in the community a better way to access health resources, wellness video and learning materials and much more.

RAIN Network’s Central California Rural Health Care Network has developed a Rural Health GIS maping system. The GIS system has been used to map clinics, public housing, schools and rural community information during 5 USDA funded telemedicine and distance learning grant projects and is designed to make use of new API’s and media interface tools which create a highly innovative, interactive GIS data system allowing physicians, nurses and other rural health care professionals to make real-time updates to the GIS data-sets from rural locations as well as to gather information. Most importantly, because “community” level use has been central to our GIS planning we have development GIS mapping systems which permit regular end user input, so rural community residents or community residents can input data for specific mapping projects. The GIS system has become a two way, highly interact tool.

We believe the preparation of a solid Telemedicine Application Framework which outlines methods to be used to coordinate Telemedicine applications and health information distribution to Rural Communities, including very rural seniors, farm and ranch workers and families is essential and projects completed by RAIN Internet provide excellent, working models which are easy to follow in setting up new rural and urban community Internet networks.

Building an Internet Bridge Part 4 - Creating Community Technology Centers

Building an Internet Bridge – part 4 –

Creating Community Technology Centers which ensured Free Public Access for the Community.

We have been discussing the Framework which RAIN Network was establishing in the early 1990's to help define the National development of Community oriented Internet Networks or “FreeNets”.

That first Framework for Community Internet was made of these parts:

•Services to Small Farms, (early Ag-Tourism efforts, Small Farm online marketing)
•Services to community non-profits and community government
•Distance learning services for public schools, charter schools and home schools
•Telemedicine services for rural and chronically underserved urban seniors, families, and youth.
•Services to community Small Business to build new e-commerce skills
•Community Technology Literacy Skills development
•Services to non-English language speaking community residents

To help make these services available and understood in the Community RAIN Internet hosted technology skills classes and provided online access at Farmers Markets, Schools and Senior Centers on site using the Network’s Internet Bus. The Internet Bus was developed through USDA funding, designed to provide a mobile Computer learning lab with solar panels on the roof of the bus providing power and a satellite dish on the roof providing Internet connectivity.

The idea was to have a local Community Technology Lab and a mobile Tech Lab that could get out to those in our Community who did not have transportation to get to the Lab.

For 11 years, from 1994 to 2005, RAIN’s Community Technology Center in Santa Barbara, California, U.S., provided a model for other communities to follow in setting up an effective, well used Community Technology Learning Lab, library and meeting place used by over 500 non-profit organizations, over 2000 local small businesses as well as by families, teaches, seniors and youth, as a place to come to get online, learning about the Internet and build Technology Literacy Skills. The Santa Barbara RAIN Community Internet Lab was the Training Lab for Teachers, Physicians, Small Business owners and students.

Community Technology Centers are as important to every town and city as Public Libraries are. They provide a place where low income families, seniors, youth, (basically, anyone in the community who needs it) can come for free Internet Access and regular Technology Literacy Skills classes.

The Community Tech Centers are as important for the growth of American Technology as access to adequate bandwidth for rural areas. They ensure that the Internet becomes something regular folks understand. It is important to remember that each Community Technology Center in the United States and Europe represents a point of Free Access for members of the community who might not otherwise have that access. In a time when we see the U.S. Justice Department saying 2 Tier Internet is ok it becomes all the more essential that we provide free points of access to members of the Community who need it.

What does Your Community Internet have to do with your Schools?

RAIN Community Internet worked with Homeplanet.net to create Camp Internet in 1994. Camp Internet is an online learning campus with classes and study programs for everyone from 4th grade through Adult Life Long Learning which has received a Smithsonian Institution Technology Innovation Award. Special study areas like Linux for High Schoolers and Adults, Ancient Southwest History, the History of the California Channel Islands, GIS data mapping, and Exploring the California BackCounty are just part of the new resources found within the Camp Internet online campus. Bi-lingual picture books in many study areas are available for younger students to give them access to all the exciting resources available for older students.

Our Camp Internet program is one of the strongest examples of the positive impact a regional non-profit Community Internet can have. Through Camp Internet and a valued series of grants from the USDA Rural Utilities Service, we have been able to train Teachers each year dramatically improving Technology Literacy Skills at all the schools we work with. Since 1998 over 25,000 4th - 12th grade students have used Camp Internet for at least one full year of curriculum support.

Go to:
http://www.campinternet.net to explore this innovative and valuable example of the services provided by your Community Internet Network.

Go to:
http://www.rain.org/campinternet/2007-2008/briefing-back-to-school-aug-20-2007.html
to read the Back To School Briefing for 2007.
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