Mary Hoffman runs the Small Business Development Center which is housed in Adams State College in Alamosa. There are more than 1100 of these centers around the nation, and Alamosa is the largest in a several county area, and with its Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Safeway, it is a shopping destination for residents many miles away. The college turns out teachers for southern Colorado. My visit to the campus was at the end of the school year, and the paths were deserted, the computers in the library lab were free, and few students were in evidence. There were even plenty of parking spaces. Ann's small office in the Business building was full of books and papers and mirrored her busy life. Earlier in 2001 she had received the Colorado "Star" award for an outstanding SBDC employee.

I asked her about her involvement with the Valley Flakes MIRA team. "I had not done this sort of project before. I was really busy because I have a client base of 300 small businesses, so I got a work-study student who did the phone tree for our group. We stuck with phones even though about three-quarters of us had email. We wanted to do something fun and different. We had special t-shirts, and we laughed a lot." Her group was not just from Alamosa. She involved college students too, and it was a big time commitment for them because they were already very busy with college. While other groups knew what they wanted to do from the very beginning, the Valley Flakes did not decide until the very end of the training period. Their main goal was to find public areas with no computers for local access, and they narrowed it down to the library in San Luis I had visited the day before and the senior center in Antonito, about an hour south of Alamosa. "We decided we could not sustain a complete tech center, so we worked with these existing organizations." John Miller, the youngest member, helped install the machines in both locations. "We decided on a workshop for the seniors, but they have a lot of obstacles: seeing the screen, learning the mouse. Mary said she had been working with a senior in Antonito, and after a tour of web sites around the world, she sat back, sighed and said, "I just can't believe the world we are living in." From that little town of 800 Ann and the senior sent electronic mail to some of her relatives. "What I found most valuable was the way people connected with each other and just had a chance to talk. I think the small town attitude was sort of disspelled." She noted that the training was a challenge because people's needs and skill levels were so different. Now that MIRA was over, Mary was thinking of new projects that would also tie in with her small business advocacy: recycling computers, and having an environmentally friendly fair for local enterprises and businesses outside the valley.