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by Josie Bannerman

Bridges for Women Society

Bridges for Women Society is a charitable non-profit organization providing employability programming to women in Victoria British Columbia who have abuse histories, and receive income assistance. Our program began in 1988 with funding from the federal government through Canadian Job Strategies, then later through Family Violence Division of Health Canada as a three year demonstration project. After that, our program was adopted by the BC Ministry of Education, Skills and Training as a model for “bridging” programs in communities across the province.

Bridges is a second stage education program - women are out of crisis and committed to new directions upon entrance. Our board and staff are committed to creating an environment where women can begin their search for productive and interesting lives. We encourage women to aim for work which will bring them personal satisfaction, and allow them to support themselves and their families to a standard in excess of the poverty line. Much of the emphasis in our program is on personal development skills, communication skills, returning to learning, and math and English upgrading.

So, what are we doing on the Internet?

Computers have played a role in our programming since the beginning. It is important to make the point that we aren’t in the business of computer training - computers are just another tool for the women who come into our program to learn to use. Our goals have been to give women an opportunity to become comfortable with computers, learn basic mousing, keyboarding and word processing skills, get some idea of the range of software available, and perhaps identify packages they might want to learn after they leave Bridges to help them achieve their goals.

Going on-line, which we did about two years ago, has pumped a lot of new energy into our computer operations, and we are still working on integrating computers more fully into our curriculum and our environment.

. . . e-mail

Although we have had a web site up for over a year now, our most common on-line activity is still e-mail. There are usually one or two students in each class who are keen about e-mail right away, and they pass their enthusiasm on to others. We help students set up e-mail accounts at the Victoria Telecommunity Network (VTN or freenet), as soon as they show an interest. By the end of their first four months at Bridges, most students have their own e-mail addresses. If they don’t, and they continue on at Bridges, then we encourage them to get one. We make a small donation to the VTN for each student who sets up an account.

We are excited about helping our students get VTN e-mail accounts because they can continue to use them after they graduate from Bridges. We work hard to encourage participants to look outward and build up their resources in the community while they’re in our program. By helping them open Freenet accounts, showing them how to use their accounts at Bridges, and then introducing them to public access terminals at the library, we give them resources they can continue to use long after they graduate.

Women in our program use e-mail to communicate, and sometimes - if friends and family are far away - it saves them long distance charges they can ill afford. One student was thrilled to have daily contact with her son who worked overseas - e-mail helped them be part of each other’s lives again. Another student uses e-mail to explore career possibilities - she “dares” herself to establish and carry on e-mail correspondence with people who are doing the type of work she hopes to do one day. Many students comment that they really feel like they are living in the ’90s, or that they have a lot more in common with their children, now that they know how to use a computer and even have an e-mail address.

. . . access to the public library’s on-line catalogue

Something we are trying this fall for the first time, is giving students opportunities to access the public library’s dial-up catalogue. Once on-line, what you see on your computer screen at Bridges is the same as what you see on a terminal at the library. Students have an opportunity to practice author, title and subject searches at Bridges - and build their skills and confidence - before they go to the library and try it in public. It helps to make the library a more familiar and accessible place. Using the on-line catalogue also gives students an opportunity to practice formulating information search strategies - a skill they will appreciate more fully when they start surfing the world wide web.

. . . and speaking of the web

We officially launched our web site on June 1, 1996. I worked with a team of students on it one night a week for three months. We explored and found things out and taught each other everything we needed to know as we went along. I think this might also be called doing things the hard way!

We had big plans for the site which haven’t materialized yet, perhaps because we are still in the process of making space in our organization for a web page. It is a new medium, and we haven’t figured out yet how it will work for us. Nor have we found a way of engaging students so that they are not only eager to develop content, but also have the skills to do so.

In spite of these reservations, our web site has a lot going for it, and lots of potential. A featured resource is our Survivor’s Handbook. This is a guide which is compiled from time to time by students in our Extension program, and it provides directory information about social service agencies in Victoria. We sell the print version to doctors and lawyers, college and university students, job seekers and many others. The electronic version, now on our web site, follows the hardcopy version in its design. But it could be much more of an electronic document than it is now - it could be one big list accessed by a search engine. We could locate all of the agencies on a digitized transit map so that readers would not only know which agency to visit, but also which bus to take to get there. And that’s not all - the one big list could be easily updated, so that when we come to publish the fourth edition of the Survivor’s Handbook we’ll be working from a current listing.