A decade ago, the city of East St. Louis with its long record of poverty and high unemployment levels had reached an alarming level of civic bankruptcy. The seeds of the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) were sown when, in response to State Representative Wyvette H. Young's request for technical assistance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Urban Extension Minority Access Program was initiated for the legislative district containing East St. Louis (ESL). In 1990, beginning with a pilot neighborhood planning workshop, ESLARP committed itself to a partnership between the ESL community and eight participating UIUC units. Faculty and students primarily from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the Department of Landscape Architecture and the School of Architecture, have been directly working on projects that have produced tangible improvements in very poor neighborhoods, enhanced the quality of life for ordinary citizens and increased the ability of neighborhood organizations to successfully complete community development projects. Neighborhood beautification, housing improvement, job creation, and park development are examples of projects undertaken by ESLARP. By providing opportunities for hands-on work through repeated visits to project sites, ESLARP has emphasized to its students the relationship of the design professions to grassroots community stabilization and development efforts. Information Technology* in ESLARP Unlike the majority of projects undertaken by East St. Louis (ESL) since 1990, which had been conceived by local residents and officials in a partnership with UIUC, the introduction and implementation of information technology (IT) in ESLARP in 1994 had almost exclusively been a University-initiative; sparked off by the needs of the research and academic community at UIUC. The spark spread in 1996 to the ESL community with the attempt to bring computer technology, including Internet capabilities, to its residents.
*The term Information Technology (IT) encompasses a variety of technologies. For the purpose of this evaluation, it refers specifically to computer technology with and/or without Internet capabilities.