Gale Brewer Hosts Instructive Tech Clinic for Senior Citizens

Upper West Side City Councilmember Gale Brewer organized another now-annual Older Adult Tech Clinic, which provides senior citizens with hands-on assistance for all of their technical problems, at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium on October 29. Considering that our modern tech appliances–whether running on Apple iOS or Android–can be pesky and hard to navigate at any age, and can seem downright obtuse the older one gets, it was unsurprising that the event had a healthy turnout.

Brewer told Straus News that some people “just don’t know how to use their phones,” through no fault of their own. “They want to have a personal discussion about just turning it on, not to mention talking to the grandchildren. Experts are here to help with them.”

“I can’t tell you how excited people are to have this kind of personal help with their phones. You get panicked when you’re older, and you don’t know what to do,” she added.

The Lighthouse Guild, an organization focused on helping vision-impaired people, was on-site to help out for the first time. People struggling with vision loss “don’t know where to go to, a lot of the time,” Guild Chief Technology Officer Bryan Wolynski said. Technology is “the most powerful thing in your pocket,” he added, and learning how to master it can be empowering. “Digital literacy is difficult as it is.”

Mikhail Valentin, who was manning a booth on behalf of the New York Public Library, said that the beloved institution has a perhaps-unknown mission of “giving adults free quality tech education.” In addition to meeting people where they’re at during the event, the NYPL offers “TechConnect” courses for people that may be seeking extra help, Valentin said.

Renie Reese, a local resident and a big fan of Gale Brewer, had attended the clinic before. She was also very appreciative of Senior Planet, a popular AARP initiative that offers online classes to older adults and sends representatives to Brewer’s clinic. “I’m always having issues with my devices,” Reese said. “Today I signed up to do something with my laptop.”

“I’m expecting them to tell me it’s too old already, even though it’s my new computer,” Reese said–a highly relatable occurrence given how quickly companies like Microsoft and Apple overhaul their models.

Bonnie, another New Yorker, was at the clinic to figure out how to clean up her hard-drive to make her computer “go faster” (another very relatable issue). “What I’d like to do is offload it to an external drive,” she explained, as well as “coordinate my iPhone with my iMac. iCloud just stymies me.”

The clinic didn’t just attract people from around the way. Oxford, Pennsylvania residents Martha and Allen were vacationing in NYC, and used some free time to stop by the event. They figured they’d look for inspiration as to what “services we can bring back to our more rural community,” Martha said.

“The subway will not be coming there, nor the buses,” she joked. “Yet I have some ideas that I can bring back, and people have said we can set up Zooms.”