Peer Ambassadors is a grant funded program for African-American and Latino youth whose goal is to mentor teens in the community as well as make other community groups aware of their concerns regarding jobs, education, etc. The lab that this group will use is in the Champaign County Public Health District building in Champaign. Some of the kids just work in the summer whereas others are in the program throughout the year.

The CTC lab section’s role was to was to deliver five computers for their lab and one computer to be used for cataloging at the Champaign Youth Detention Center’s library. The lab computers will be used to support the groups projects such as making promotional and presentation materials. In addition to delivering the computers, we networked them and provided a connection to a networked printer. We also moved the furniture needed to support the lab. We trained the group on the parts of a network, how to take apart and reassemble computers, use BIOS, load software, upgrade the memory use Open Office and the Linux operating system. We expect that the lab will be low maintenance due to automatic software updates and cleanup scripts running on the computers. We also provided training on the Alexandria software for the cataloging computer.