Computer Banc works to close the digital divide

It’s yet another Saturday work day at Springfield’s Computer Banc, where digital wizards infuse computers with new hope for the future.

A pale green panel van backs up to a door in the small, ordinary white building on a nondescript asphalt lot at 1023 East Washington. The driver swings open the van’s back doors. The inside is stuffed full with stack after shrinkwrapped stack of computer hard drives. Men exit the building and walk purposefully to the rear of the van and efficiently unload its cargo.

Inside, each piece of equipment first sits on a shelf and awaits triage, to determine if it’s salvageable and can be refurbished by Computer Banc volunteer computer experts.

Computers that don’t make the cut are set aside and later scavenged for replacement parts or head to the recycling bin. The acceptable computers are destined for low-income students in District 186 or provided for a nominal fee to low-income adults.

Digital divide

For the past 10 years, the nonprofit Computer Banc has been doing its part locally to bridge what’s dubbed “the digital divide.” The phrase was first used in the mid-1990s to describe the gap between people with access to computers and those without.

Today, as computer technology evolves, the term is more ambiguous, including the ability to afford Internet access and, at a more fundamental level, the general economic disparity between “the haves and the have nots.”

Some experts deny the existence of a digital divide, claiming that access to any new technology is always limited at first to those who can afford to purchase it; eventually, they claim, as the technology gets increasingly affordable, such a gap disappears.

According to the latest U.S. Census data, 88 percent of families making $75,000-plus had at least one computer and 79 percent had at least one household member who used the Internet.

Not even one in four of families making below $25,000 owned a computer, and only 19 percent had Internet access at home.

The availability of computers and Internet access at school, however, tends to level the playing field across the economic spectrum for children. The same cannot be said for adults.

The plain truth is that not everybody in Sangamon County who wants, and needs, a computer owns one, or has access to one.

“There is such a demand, so many requests, that we have the monthly output allocated in the first five days of the month,” said David Fowler, volunteer development coordinator for Computer Banc, “and the phone keeps ringing the rest of the month. We just can’t fill them all.”

Fowler is hopeful that Computer Banc’s recent certification as a United Way agency will allow it to network with sister agencies to expand its influx of used computers and its output of refurbished ones. Such links could help Computer Banc make procedural changes that take into account the evolving nature of the digital divide.

“There is such a demand, so many requests, that we have the monthly output allocated in the first five days of the month and the phone keeps ringing the rest of the month. We just can’t fill them all.”

When Computer Banc opened, for example, it initially gave free, refurbished computers to low-income families with children with learning disabilities, said Computer Banc board president Kevin Stevenson.

“We moved away from that to service anyone low income,” he said. “If the family has children that qualify for the free lunch program, they qualify for our program. For families without kids, they can go through an agency and get a computer for $100.”

Computer Banc first set up shop in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church. Today, it shares a building in downtown Springfield with Catholic Charities’ food pantry.

Quarters are cramped as usual on a work day, as the volunteers move about in all different directions, joking and talking with each other like old friends. There is a feeling of comfortable camaraderie here, a kind of science club for grownup boys who like to play with electronics.

Many of the volunteers are, or were, the IT people at big area corporations or own hightech small businesses, guys who know their stuff when it comes to computers. Other volunteers perform the triage or lift computers and monitors and move them about, and countless other duties. They are here every Saturday, and every other Tuesday night, refurbishing computers, wiping everything off the hard drives, then reloading them with Microsoft XP operating systems, Pentium 4 processors and hundreds of dollars worth of children’s, educational and office software.

One area is marked by a sign warning, “Notice: Senior Techs Only Pass This Point.” Beyond sit casually dressed senior technicians on stools at waist-high benches loaded with disemboweled computers and active testing equipment, monitors and wires, electronic parts of all sorts and a half-empty coffee cup or two.

Although Computer Banc gives away computers and the technicians won’t get paid for their work, don’t get the impression the computers are inferior.

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