Growing with Technology Awards

Self-Help for the Elderly

Non-Profit
Second Runner-Up

URL: www.selfhelpelderly.org
Location: San Francisco, CA
Employees: 165 full-time, 462 part-time
Executive Sponsor: Caroline Ng, Office Director
Cisco Products: Cisco (?) Switches, Cisco (?) Access Points

An Older Population Gains Empowerment Through Technology

Self-Help for the Elderly is a multi-service agency that serves 25,000 immigrant seniors per year in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties in California. Along with hot meals, the agency offers services that include employment/training, social activities, in-home assistance, and residential board and care. To help its population keep up with an increasingly technology-centric world, the agency opened its first Technology Information and Empowerment (TIE) Center in San Francisco's Chinatown district in 1998, and has since opened two more centers. These centers provide bilingual computer and Internet access and training to a population that might otherwise end up on the wrong side of the "digital divide."

Connecting its Community—and Improving its Efficiency

On Self-Help for the Elderly's Website, seniors can read newsletters and learn about upcoming events, types of services, and office locations, in both English and Chinese. They can register to vote, obtain information on local, state, and federal issues, and communicate directly with city and county officials. The agency's offices are linked through a Cisco network, and staff members can use a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access the client database, and easily look up information to serve seniors better and faster. The switches and routers can be easily configured and managed, which frees up staff time and resources. And inter-office phone calls are placed over the Internet, which saves money and improves collaboration.

Thanks to Self-Help for the Elderly and its use of technology, immigrant seniors in the San Francisco Bay Area are no longer an underserved population.