Residents of a poor West Baltimore neighborhood now have free Internet access at a new cyber center, the national prototype of what organizers said will bring hundreds of high-tech jobs to inner-city and rural areas.
By logging on to one of 47 computer stations, residents can telecommute to work from the Harvey Johnson Neighborhood CyberCentre that opened Tuesday at Union Baptist Church on the 1200 block of Druid Hill Avenue.
The center is the first of what the locally based Centre for Management and Technology said will be hundreds nationwide. The center will bring e-mail and applications as simple as Microsoft Word to teens and seniors, they said.
“This isn?t a novel idea ? you find them in African nations and Europe, but for some reason, they haven?t seemed to catch on in the U.S.,” said Lynn Farrow, vice president of CMAT. “We want them to be in rural and urban areas where people don?t have Internet in their homes.”
Located in the 21217 ZIP code, one of the nation?s poorest, according to Farrow, the church also was selected for its proximity to the company, a technology help desk for nonprofit organizations.
The church recently built what was intended to be a recreation center and decided to bring it into the 21st century, senior pastor Alvin Hathaway said.
Hathaway said the center will help restructure a community that has lost many of its resources.
Indeed, CMAT chief executive officer Alan Fabian said the company is working with firms that have expressed interest in hiring residents to work customer service and call-center jobs from the facility for $10 to $20 an hour.
“This will bridge the digital divide in a sustainable manner,” Fabian said. “One of the main goals of the neighborhood cyber center is to create high-tech jobs in the inner city.”
Studies indicate the digital divide – a term that describes the gap between those with regular access to digital information and those without – is widening. According to a 2005 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, adults living in households with annual incomes of $30,000 or less are about half as likely as the highest-income Americans to go online.
