A man returned to the Downtown Eastside Tech Café several times after receiving his first mobile phone, practising how to make and answer calls until a frustrating new world began to feel manageable.

Many of us send messages, listen to voicemail, check appointments and open email without thinking. For someone learning them for the first time, each moment opens a way to connect, find information and take part in a world that assumes everyone knows how technology works.

“So much of life is online now,” says Betsy Alkenbrack, Downtown Eastside Literacy Outreach Coordinator and retired Adult Basic Education teacher with more than four decades in literacy and community education.

“People need technology to apply for benefits, access services, book medical appointments and complete everyday tasks.”

Each week, people arrive with phones, laptops and practical problems many of us solve with a tap, swipe or click. They bring forgotten passwords, email accounts to create, housing applications to complete and medical appointments to book online.

A woman in her seventies came to the Tech Café while living in a shelter and searching for permanent housing. Today, she has a place to call home.

Developed by the Downtown Eastside Literacy Roundtable in partnership with UBC Learning Exchange, the Tech Café helps people find their way through a digital world. Staff and Tech Ambassadors, many Downtown Eastside residents, help community members use smartphones, email, Google Docs, WhatsApp and online government services.

What looks like a technical problem carries serious consequences. An email address determines whether a housing application moves forward, an online portal controls access to a government benefit, and a forgotten password shuts someone out of urgently needed information.

“We end up becoming navigators because the work quickly becomes about much more than technology,” Alkenbrack says.

At the Tech Café, people learn over coffee, conversation and patient guidance, without being expected to arrive knowing the answers. People return as intimidating tasks begin to make sense, confidence grows and technology becomes less of a barrier and more of a tool.

Alkenbrack knows outsiders too often define the Downtown Eastside by poverty, homelessness and drug use. Walk through the doors of a community centre, she says, and a fuller community comes into view, rich with creativity, resilience, humour and people looking out for one another.

That spirit runs through the Tech Café, where knowledge is shared freely and confidence grows with each return. A question that begins with a phone or a password often leads to greater independence.

Behind that local work is Decoda Literacy Solutions, B.C.’s provincial literacy organization, supporting Literacy Outreach Coordinators with resources, training, funding and connections to respond to their communities. Across the province, 101 coordinators serve more than 400 communities, shaping literacy work around the realities they see every day.

For Alkenbrack, those realities show up in the ordinary things that now defines daily life. Making a first phone call, completing a form, recognizing a scam, finding housing, booking an appointment or reaching someone you love.

When asked to complete the sentence “Technology should never…”, Alkenbrack does not hesitate.

“Technology should never be more important than people.”

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