Communities @One has been supported by the Welsh Assembly Government and European funds and is administered by the Wales Co‑operative Centre. Within the Welsh Assembly Government, the Deputy Minister for Regeneration, Leighton Andrews AM, has overall responsibility for Communities @One. To date, over 210 projects have been supported from a £6 million grant fund covering a range of organisations and activities. These include:

• Volunteers in three South Wales Valley areas, many of whom had never engaged with ICT before, set up and managed three, month-long community radio stations. Starting from scratch, the groups were trained to use digital broadcasting equipment, as well as the internet and Microsoft Office.
• In Flintshire, North Wales, a community church is housing a cyber cafe that is being used by migrant workers, young people and residents associations. Now seen as a community focal point, the project is developing aspects of its work into a social enterprise.

Some people feel comfortable saying ‘I can’t use computers’ when they would be very uncomfortable saying they were illiterate or innumerate. The danger is that people who don’t ‘get’ ICT could become increasingly socially and economically disenfranchised. Those left behind risk not just digital exclusion, but exclusion from whole areas of life.
Communities @One has built on the experience of the Welsh Assembly Government’s Communities First programme by putting in place a team of brokers to work with community and voluntary sector organisations to determine local need and the best way to address those needs.
This approach has been realised by the sheer diversity of those who have become involved: elderly people, children, disaffected young people, ethnic minority groups, blind people and teenage mothers. Communities @One has supported projects involving website design, podcasts, digital photography and film-making, community online shopping schemes, informal learning, word processing and email classes, newsletter design, driving tuition, music composition, astronomy, blogging and more. There have been schemes developed in both the English and Welsh languages and in ethnic minority languages.
The work of Communities @One has been guided by an advisory body of statutory and private organisations including BBC Wales and BT. This collaborative group has provided a creative environment, as well as giving wise counsel.
Now, as Communities @One comes to an end, Wales Co‑operative Centre chief executive Simon Harris feels there is greater potential for ICT-based social enterprise: “In time, community groups and voluntary sector organisations which have, until now, focused on digital inclusion may benefit by developing more of an economic edge. Thirty-three of the projects funded by Communities @One have already been referred to our business development officers for advice on how they can become social enterprises, or at least to have some element of community-based income generation. This approach still harnesses the potential of technologies but would move community and voluntary groups from digital exclusion, through digital inclusion, towards economic inclusion.”
The Welsh Assembly Government is developing a digital inclusion project that will build on the work of Communities @One. An application will be made to European Convergence Funding to support the work.
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www.communitiesatone.org