A Company In Milledgeville Is looking For Ways To Help The Community

Digital Bridges is a venture of Georgia College with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.The project is a citizen-led initiative involving the innovative uses of technology to improve the quality of life of the community.

Digital Bridges has been open for 18 months and during a time when companies were laying off and people were looking for jobs, Digital Bridges stepped in and looked for ways to help the Milledgeville community.

“In the beginning it was extremely technology focused, however as we turned it over to the community we really started surveying and holding public hearings. We quickly discovered the economy was the greatest concern for this community,” said Heather Holder Director of Digital Bridges.

So, the company came up with a plan.

“The focus shifted from just looking for innovated uses for technology as it applies to the community, instead looking for how we can prepare people for the job market that’s changing,” said Holder.

And with a changing job market, there was a need to help people get back to work.

” In this day and age it is more important than ever to be able to use the Internet and computer resources, especially for job hunting, finding out information, and doing research on different things. Especially for the students with research and some of the people who have been laid off from their jobs that need to fill out online applications now”, said Tommy Cook, Program director at digital bridges.

Digital Bridges has state of the art computers and flip cameras that small businesses can use to make their own commercials on youtube.

“It’s very nice and I like the decorations and the assistants here are very friendly”, said Jennifer Ngyen.

“We can’t depend anymore on people driving to your store, you also have to have a great online presence. So we do a lot to teach people and prepare them for how other people are kind of interchanging information”, said Holder.

” Everybody is different, everybody has a different background that they are drawing from when it comes to computers. Some of them are scared to death to even touch them, some of them had some limited experience. So we kind of have to identify it on an individual level about what their needs are and where we need to start from, and what kind of concepts we need to drive home at first,”  Said Cook. 

The center is free to use for anybody within the Baldwin county community. For more information you can call 478-387-0254.