Digital Equity/Digital Inclusion

Through the Marjorie & Charles Benton Opportunity Fund, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society aims to support a new generation of broadband scholars, practitioners, and advocates. Benton welcomes applications from people working on broadband access, adoption, equity, and use. We are interested in supporting a range of projects that can better inform our current or emerging broadband policy debates, either through critical research about the future of the internet in our communities or the development of best practices and tools to advance our field’s work.

While policymakers continue to make substantial investments toward universal broadband, these investments still leave gaps in Tribal connectivity. The three primary general-purpose broadband deployment grants accessible to Tribes include the Federal Communication Commission's High-Cost program, the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA's) Reconnect program, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA's) Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The US Department of the Treasury has approved an additional $66 million in broadband funding for New Hampshire under the American Rescue Plan’s Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund (CPF). New Hampshire was among the first four states to receive CPF funding from the Treasury, which approved its first award of $50 million in June.

North Carolina is currently putting to work over a billion dollars from American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding through a number of programs, including the Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grants to connect the 1.1 million households in the state unable to access the internet. Around $380 million in GREAT funding is designed to incentivize deployments to unserved rural parts of the state. The state also has a Completing Access to Broadband (CAB) program to address high-cost areas where service providers are traditionally reluctant to go along with money going to uti

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is committing over $81 million in a new funding round through the Emergency Connectivity Program (ECP), which provides digital services for students in communities across the country.

Analysis demonstrates that philanthropic organizations in the US have given little--less than 1% of overall giving by large foundations--to digital equity funding. Funding barriers may be overcome with greater participation of US institutional philanthropic giving to digital equity. Other key takeaways include:

Which rural minority communities are growing? What are the strategies behind these growth-oriented communities? Answers to these questions are central to this report; we illuminate inspiring leadership regimes and strategic policy models that are drawing in people and jobs to rural minority communities. We capitalize on a wealth of publicly available administrative data to outline these economies and deconstruct trends in employment, business creation, broadband adoption, and the labor force.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel added Brad Barry as Senior Advisor to the FCC for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Deena Shetler, as Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration. Barry will coordinate the agency’s anti-digital discrimination efforts, working in partnership with the Task Force to Prevent Digital Discrimination, which is led by D’wana Terry and Sanford Williams, Special Advisors to the Chairwoman, and Alejandro Roark, Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, who oversees engagement with stakeholders to ensure that task force rec

Supporting digital skills building is a complicated aspect of digital inclusion work. Luckily, there is no need to build an entire curriculum or even lessons entirely from scratch.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) announced its largest group yet of Digital Inclusion Trailblazers. 2022 saw a record number of submissions pour in from across the country, with the highest number of applicants yet achieving a six-star score, meeting 100 percent of the evaluation criteria.