St Sidwells Centre

What is the St. Sidwells Centre?
How does the St. Sidwells Centre use ICT?
What difference has ICT made?
What was learnt?
Want to find out more?

What is the St. Sidwells Centre? 

The St. Sidwells Centre, part of the Exeter Community Initiatives (ECI), is primarily aimed at being a community drop in café. As well as providing rooms to hire for training people, it boasts two PC suites, one for training, and one for public internet use.

How does the St. Sidwells Centre use ICT? 

Until fairly recently, the centre was supported by a host of adult learning provision and funding streams, which enabled the progression route from drop-in use, to supported use, to learning. However, by 2005, a number of projects and funding arrangements ended, resulting in a lack of staff and external funding to facilitate the training centres. Whilst new funding was trying to be secured for the services, the ICT was being supported by volunteers and informally by COSMIC, a local community centre who provide ICT training and support.

As part of the support on offer, COSMIC willingly assisted in the development and submission of ICT- related funding bids and bought about a more structured approach to the delivery of ICT training. COSMIC offered tech support and advice to the new staff to ensure their use of ICT was more effective and efficient in order to attain future goals and objectives.

What difference has ICT made? 

The collaboration with COSMIC was highly beneficial both in terms of the centres planning strategies and its ICT development. Not only did COSMIC help bid for new funding, they actively mentored the staff and continued to provide a more general ICT support service.

The COSMIC support team helped to remove inappropriate software and material from the PC’S, and recommended better strategies, such as the purchasing of a server, which has been very advantageous!

Consequently, staff morale has also greatly improved as quoted by Anderson from Sidwells:

“with COSMIC looking after our computers my life is so much less stressful and we are more productive, I know I can call on these guys and they will respond almost instantly ”,

Rob from COSMIC adds “we support their systems remotely, and on-site when necessary and we are in town ”

What was learnt? 

As Anderson made clear, having the support of dedicated ICT staff has not only resulted in greater productivity, it has removed a source of potential stress for the staff. Frontline organisations need to therefore think about gaining their own ICT support.

Want to find out more? 

Contact name: Anderson Jones

St. Sidwells Centre
14 York Road
Exeter
EX4 6BA
Tel: 01392 666222

Website address: www.stsidwells.org.uk
Email: Anderson.Jones@stsidwells.org.uk

If you would like to find out more about the topics covered in this case study, read this Knowledgebase article on why you need ICT support.