Not the Niagara picture you might have been expecting, and for good reason.
Kindness to strangers has given birth to a means of sharing library internet services for those with low and no incomes in Ontario’s Regional Municipality of Niagara.
Familiar to most, if not all: libraries everywhere have over the last couple of decades adapted their services to become lifesavers for low- and no-income citizens and their children who desperately need access to the increasingly important internet.
In the Regional Municipality of Niagara, local libraries are taking this service one step further, “exporting” the internet into homes.
It began with thinking outside the box (That would be the library itself.). The clientele: migrant workers, seasonally far from their home and working hard on Niagara Region farms without easy and affordable contact with their families. The distance to a local city or town for free wifi services is pretty much insurmountable for a farm worker flown in from thousands of miles away and isolated without local transport.
For more on how this story unfolded, read more in Niagara Today: Library offers connection with new Wi-Fi hotspot devices available for loan
