Digital Literacy

Tennessee is awarding $446,770,282 in grants for the expansion of internet access across the state. The broadband infrastructure grants will provide broadband access to more than 150,000 unserved homes and businesses across 58 counties. Funding for these grants comes through the Tennessee Emergency Broadband Fund – American Rescue Plan Act (TEBF-ARPA), which utilizes a portion of the state’s ARPA funds to address the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and work toward a strong recovery.

Lieutenant Gov Jon Husted (R-OH) is launching the newly designed Broadband Infrastructure Training Program at Buckeye Hills Career Center in Rio Grande (OH). Students will go through an approximately 12-week interactive learning journey that includes the design, installation, and service components of broadband networks.

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 pandemic created a sense of urgency about bringing internet access to more people and empowering them to use technology as a necessity of modern life.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) awarded 18 grants to recipient organizations, who will together launch the National Digital Navigator Corps. The grants are part of support from Google.org, which will go toward hiring community-based digital navigators alongside programmatic and technical support to further develop NDIA’s digital navigator model for rural and Tribal communities. The grants, which total more than $6.6 million, are for two-and-a-half-year periods and range between $320,540 and $389,840 each, depending on the need and proposal. Seven of the grantees are Tribal-le

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.

Healthcare is facing a new frontier, as the industry has seen a boom in digital health tools and technologies on both the patient and provider side. An explosion of health dat has also been driving increasingly sophisticated predictive and prescriptive insights into individuals and populations. Unfortunately, this frontier has proven to be hostile to marginalized communities. There is a growing digital divide, where healthcare technology has actually posed challenges, instead of benefits.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will provide massive opportunities for local and state organizations across the country.

The City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (PA), and Computer Reach successfully donated 324 desktop computers, 74 laptop computers, 427 monitors, 243 keyboards, and 170 mice to Computer Reach. This first donation, totaling $92,000 and completed in early August 2022, is the culmination of multiple years of work by the Department of Innovation & Performance (I&P) to give back these devices to the community and avoid paying an e-waste recycler for proper disposal.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded an $18.9 million Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP) grant to the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada (ITCN). This grant will fund high-speed internet infrastructure deployment, use, and adoption projects to improve connectivity across Tribal lands.