We have 1,300 people at Net Inclusion 2024 in Philadelphia. We’ve secured $2.75 billion from the Digital Equity Act. And this is just the beginning. It has to be just the beginning. So how do we sustain this movement? The answer to sustainability lies in robust digital inclusion ecosystems. They’re the key to HOLISTIC digital inclusion. Digital equity is the goal, and digital inclusion ecosystems lead us there by weaving together digital inclusion activities happening across your communities. These 6 strategies will help sustain our movement and field:

1. Spread Awareness: We cannot lose the awareness we gained during COVID-19 lockdowns. Awareness efforts must include the positive impacts of digital inclusion solutions—sharing stories of programmatic and individual success.
2. Build Partnerships & Coalitions: Let’s think about ecosystems as our most successful holistic solution. When those who recognize the necessity of digital equity form relationships, partnerships, and digital inclusion coalitions, their messages and programs become stronger and your ability to advocate becomes more powerful.
3. Use Data and Analytics Strategically: Our data needs to do more than explain the digital divide. This means carefully constructed data collection, program evaluations, and longitudinal studies.
4. Layer Digital Inclusion with Other Programs: Digital Inclusion can’t stand alone. Intentionally weaving digital equity throughout broadband, health, finance, education, housing, workforce, and other social programs will help increase the lasting impact of investments.
5. Keep Growing an Inclusive Community: Our advocacy has growing power! Lets keep building on it.
6. Advocating for Ongoing Federal Support

Several members of Congress teamed up with county officials to show their support for extending the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides internet access to more than 23 million households across the country. Reps Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Marc Molinaro (R-NY), and Norma Torres (D-CA), and county officials advocated for the extension of the program. Congress must come together to pass the “bipartisan, common-sense and urgent” extension, or else millions of Americans will be left behind in the digital divide, Rep Torres urged. Counties are “absolutely unified” in support of extending the ACP, said Sonoma County (CA) Supervisor James Gore, National Association of Counties first vice president, who called the program a “moral imperative.” 

The Department of the Treasury released new analysis on the benefits of President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda for Georgia. These resources and incentives—including those unlocked by the American Rescue Plan Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—are catalyzing historic growth for small businesses, supporting workers, strengthening housing security, closing the digital divide, and unleashing private-sector investments in clean energy in predominantly underserved communities. Georgia received $250 million for broadband infrastructure from the American Rescue Plan’s Capital Projects Fund to connect 70,000 households and businesses to reliable, high-speed internet. In addition, the state is investing $377.2 million of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program funds in broadband infrastructure in areas that are currently unserved or underserved. These communities lack a wireline connection that reliably delivers minimum speeds of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is winding down and will end in April when the rest of its funding is expected to run out, unless Congress enacts legislation to refund it. Failing to renew ACP is expected to have a significant impact on tens of millions of households across the country and could adversely affect efforts to close the digital divide. According to Adeyinka Ogunlegan, Vice President, Government Affairs and Policy at EducationSuperhighway, "234,000 households in Mississippi are in jeopardy of having their connectivity either completely interrupted or seeing their internet service bills go up, depending on how they’re leveraging the benefit.” EducationSuperHighway’s data shows that over 20,000 Mississippi households are veteran households currently participating in ACP, 122,000 households are in rural parts of the state, and 72,000 are senior households. “These are critical communities that we know rely on internet access for so many things in terms of access to health care, money, businesses, keeping their children educated, and accessing all the resources that the internet provides all of us,” Ogunlegan said.

The Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau seeks comment on specific mechanisms to implement multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). Through these measures, the Bureau advances the priority that WEA serve as an effective and accessible life-saving tool for many, including the millions of people living in the United States who do not primarily speak English or Spanish and the estimated one-in-four adults in the United States that have some form of disability who remain at risk for not being able to receive and understand the potentially life-saving information conveyed by WEA messages in an accessible language and format. We propose a set of pre-translated WEA messages in English, the 13 most commonly spoken languages in the United States, and American Sign Language, that would be pre-installed and stored on mobile devices offered by Participating Commercial Mobile Service Providers. We also seek comment on support for form-fillable templates that would include information specific to the particular emergency. Finally, we seek comment on whether Participating Providers’ device offerings should support templates in additional languages.

Cartesian is a Boston-based consulting firm that has become a familiar name in the telecommunications world. It’s working with the Fiber Broadband Association, ACA Connects and NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association on projects related to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) fund. Samuel Kornstein, managing director at Cartesian, said the company had good timing with BEAD because it had coincidentally published a study—before the BEAD legislation—estimating how much it would cost to deploy fiber to all parts of the country that didn’t have it. Kornstein said it’s tricky for the service providers because BEAD allows each state to customize its own program to a large extent. That makes for some complicated financial and mapping models, especially for the incumbents that already have footprints across different states. But the good news is that with BEAD being distributed at the state level, the operators can really engage with the state broadband officers and find the best local solutions.