The Digital Equity Leadership Lab: A Case Study of Community Leadership Development to Promote Digital Equity and Justice

In 2021, twenty-five community leaders from across Baltimore came together with national experts in areas related to network engineering, federal policymaking, community broadband networking, and grassroots organizing for a five-week online program, called “The Digital Equity Leadership Lab (DELL).” DELL was created by Robert W Deutsch Foundation staff as a response to other digital inclusion programs across the US that have failed to consider the technical aspects of the internet and social inequalities alongside broader internet policy and advocacy goal. Through interviews with fifteen of the twenty-five participants, plus national experts and Foundation staff, the case study sought to answer the question: How might DELL serve as a community-based leadership training model to develop the next wave of digital equity leaders? The case study is significant because it addresses a lack of understanding in both the scholarly literature and in practice about the role of community-based leadership development to promote digital equity and justice. The following three key findings emerged from the analysis: (1) Bringing national policymakers and advocates together with community leaders is powerful and transformative; (2) digital inequality is a social not a technological problem; and (3) community leaders need access to a shared platform and each other to create change.

[Colin Rhinesmith is a Faculty Associate and Director of the Community Informatics Lab at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and a Senior Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.]