As part of a campaign to help increase low-income and monolingual Latinos' access to online education, as well as health care information, some groups in California are providing personal computers and internet access. One group in the San Francisco Bay Area have made strides, helped by a holiday-time campaign and fund drive.

As we've reported previously, the Latino Community Foundation partnered this Christmas season with other Latino community nonprofits, as well as the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) with the goal of raising $30,000 to provide low-cost, internet-ready computers to monolingual and low-income Latino families in California.

The foundation announced earlier this week that the fundraising drive over the holiday managed to raise $32,500, which was matched by the CETF, according to California Healthline. The foundation provided computers and internet access for 600 new families in the San Francisco Bay Area. So far, the group has managed to get 5,000 families trained and obtain computers for 1,000 families, with the further goal of getting another 2,400 families connected.

"The data shows 40 percent are not connected to the internet and have no computers at home," said Raquel Donoso, CEO of the California-based Latino Community Foundation. "This is a fundamental piece of how families are getting information, how they are able to communicate to the world. Forty percent is something we want to do something about."

Broader statistics show that there is still a gap in Latino families throughout the U.S. and having broadband home internet access. Pew Internet and American Life survey last year found that only 53 percent of Hispanic families have broadband at home.

The digital divide is not just about access to technology and education. Latino families' health can be positively affected by having access to the internet. Another Pew poll from 2012 found that 72 percent of internet users looked online for health information -- be it symptoms, conditions, information on specific diseases, procedures, or looking up doctors and health care officials. "There are high rates of diabetes, and we are increasingly seeing high rates of depression," Donoso said about Latino families that don't have internet access. "There are health disparities that we see in these communities."

And, of course, in the age of the Affordable Care Act and healthcare exchanges that can be reached online -- especially in California, which has a web portal for health insurance written in clear Spanish called Covered California -- having internet access is all the more important. Getting low-income Latino families internet-ready computers is a big part of the process, but Donoso says more content needs to be available in Spanish -- something that may happen as the new .UNO web domain extension gets more popular.

"There is a lot of information out there," Donoso said. "I still think there is still need for Spanish language content. There are sites that you can get it translated into Spanish, but not a huge amount of sites geared to Latinos in the U.S."