Trinfo.Cafe continues to evolve as the needs in the community and at the College change. Over the last three years, Trinfo has transformed into a conduit linking faculty and students with our community partners and creating avenues for our community partners to get access to college facilities and resources.
Trinfo’s work with faculty ranges from holding class sessions and lectures at Trinfo to community learning site placements for students and variety of research assignments with community partners. Each semester Trinfo staff supports several community learning classes, including courses across a variety of disciplines.
One such class is Hispanic Hartford, a core requirement in the Hispanic Studies department of Modern Languages. Over the last several years, Trinfo helped facilitate the building of a website which houses information about resources in the Latino community, train students on accessing the site to upload their blogs, and conducting a series of workshops at the end of each semester to prepare students for their final video projects.
Students also do internships and independent studies at Trinfo. William Pollack, class of 2010, completed an independent study where after returning from a semester abroad in Santiago, Chile, he spent two semesters at Trinfo developing a computer literacy workshop for newly arrived immigrants and a customer satisfaction survey for all patrons taking computer literacy courses. In addition, Will used his time at Trinfo to conduct research for a comparative analysis on the approaches employed by Chile and the US to tackle the digital divide. His essay, Achieving Digital Inclusion: An Urban-Global Comparison of Digital Divide Programs in Chile and Hartford, illustrates how Trinfo is supporting student learning beyond community learning, by linking the experiences students are having abroad and giving them the platform to conduct comparative research, thus linking the urban and global missions of the college.
During the Fall 2010 semester, Sandra Gonzalez, class of 2011, completed an internship for her community learning class Organizing in Neighborhoods at Trinfo.Cafe where she taught computer literacy classes in Spanish to city residents; organized a community educational event in conjunction with the Trinity College student group Stop The Raids on a provision of the Obama administration’s immigration policy called the DREAM Act; and wrote a comparative analysis on the different approaches Spain and the US take towards undocumented immigrants.
Please visit the Hispanic Hartford Issues, Multimedia, and Scholarship pages for more examples of Trinfo’s support of student scholarship.