It was a white-tablecloth kind of night at the National Museum of Mexican Art on Saturday, July 23, as local residents filled the conference room for the celebration of the Pilsen Portal's Second Anniversary Party.
"We're really proud of the work we're doing with the Smart Communities," says Pilsen program manager Elizabeth Rosas-Landa, who organized the event. "And the portal was the first program we launched to help make the Internet a useful, everyday part of life in Pilsen."
In her presentation, Rosas-Landa showed that traffic on the portal has increased significantly in the last year, as more and more local residents are contributing stories, events and listings and looking to the portal to find out what's going on in Pilsen.
Other speakers at the event included Ulises Zatarain, the New Communities Program Director for Pilsen at the Resurrection Project; Dionne Baux, the Smart Communities Program Officer for LISC/Chicago; and Moira Pujols, the editor of Contratiempo, a Spanish-language literary magazine published in Pilsen, which has become a key partner with the Pilsen Portal this year.
More than a dozen local restaurants such as Fogata Village and La Casa del Pueblo provided free food and drinks for the crowd, and organizations and stores from Pilsen provided information about everything from the Digital Youth Network to Dr. Stitch, a local "certified apparel technician."
"The portal is a great way for local restaurants and stores to have a presence on the Internet," Rosas-Landa says. "Keep an eye on the Pilsen Portal, because we've got some great plans to make the site even more helpful to our local businesses."
