employment and self-sufficiency. Chester County OIC continues the battle against injustice and discrimination through education and life skills training. To learn more about CC-OIC, go to their web page http://www.cc-oic.org or call (610) 692-2344 and speak with Joyce Chester, the Executive Director of CC-OIC. Ceil Harkness is the program director for CC-OIC's I CAN program (Independent Career Action Network). Most of the six students in this pilot were recent graduates of that program. Tanya Baxter, Vice President of CCIL and an educator in the West Chester Area School District, trained the first group of students in a three-week computer course.

Students who successfully complete this course are given a computer to take home, purchased by CC-OIC from Team Children, http://teamchildren.com/childrensproject

/children's_project.htm. Team Children is the single most successful non-profit organization in our region helping economically challenged families; schools and organizations receive low cost refurbished computers. CCIL also provides an email account and free Internet access to each student.

Thanks to the CCIL volunteer team of Ed Callahan, John Hamilton, and Don Homer, and Doug Purdy, computers donated to the students were setup with new passwords and tested over a dial-up phone line. Microsoft patches and anti-virus software were updated. OpenOffice 2.0 was installed and customized on the computers. CC-OIC also provided printers for each student.

  The CCIL volunteers also completed installation of the printer software and drivers. Graduates from this course are assigned a one-to-one volunteer e-literacy mentor help each graduate with their access to the Internet. The e-Mentors will also continue to train the graduates, while using various computer programs and services. The students and the e-Mentors primarily communicate by email and phone calls. Resources available to students and the other e-Mentors are each other and the complete group of CCIL Technical Volunteers. Anticipated are about 90 days of active mentoring when they should be pretty self-sufficient.

The program's goal is launch the students on their way to being increasingly e-Literate. For now that means being comfortable using a computer, email, and the Internet to assist them with their life - communicating with friends and potential employers and employers, searching for jobs, shopping for bargains, looking for apartments, etc.

 CCIL would like to expand this mentoring to other non-profits in Chester County; to do so we need more e-Mentors. You don't have to be a computer genius to be an e-Mentor; merely comfortable using a computer yourself. We have other technical volunteers to back you up if any question exceeds your own knowledge. You can volunteer to be an e-Mentor at www.ccil.org/tasks.htm.