Members to Prairie Visions hard at work at the R.O. Workshop

Prairie Visions, the Dundy County Senior Citizens Services, Inc., is a group of senior centers, each of which was started in 1985 through the Older Americans Act.

As a MIRA CSO, Prairie Visions wanted to use technology to increase the communications among the five senior centers in order to created greater interaction between the centers and their communities. Prairie Visions also wanted to use technology to bridge the age gap between young and old.

Prairie Vision representaives at R.O. Workshop

To accomplish these goals, Prairie Visions purchased the necessary equipment to bring the centers up-to-date and online. Then, working with a high school communications class, Prairie Visions recruited student volunteers to work with the center's seniors one-on-one. The volunteers instructed seniors on everything from typing letters to the internet and email. Prairie Visions also created a training manual to be used by the seniors when student volunteers were unavailable. The manual offered detailed instruction on a variety of programs and other computer uses.

As the youth of the communities provided the seniors with their technical expertise, the seniors were providing the youth with their historical knowledge in the form of an oral history video. This video not only shares tourist information on the hotspots of their corner of Nebraska, it also shares part of the unique and rich history that build the five small towns located there.

Prairie Visions also participated in a joint CSO workshop held at the Grant Senior Center. The CSOs brought in a successful grant writer, who has written over a million dollars worth of grants, to instruct local city and county representatives and members of nonprofit organizations on finding and writing grants.