Patricia Donald is Head of ICT at Advice NI, a social justice charity based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Patricia leads on Advice NI’s Supporting Active Engagement project, in which a team of volunteers support older people living in sheltered accommodation to go online and access their rights and entitlements. It was through this work that she developed a passion for supporting those that were being left behind in the digital age to have the opportunity to be able to access the Internet and reap the benefits that many of us take for granted.
In 2018 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, enabling her to travel to Australia and Japan to explore how digital inclusion learning programmes were enabling older people to avail of the benefits the Internet has to offer, e.g. reducing social isolation, improving independence, financial inclusion and better quality of life
This website is a report of Patricia’s findings and contains a number of recommendations that she believes could contribute to the work already being done across the UK to address the barriers to digital inclusion.
The report was written in November 2019.