Individuals who are Members of a Racial or Ethnic Minority Group

The Southern Rural Development Center in partnership with the Purdue Center for Regional Development received funding from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to document digital exclusion among disadvantaged groups in the South, gauge the digital inclusion capacity of Cooperative Extension personnel, and design and implement programs and resources to tackle digital exclusion. As part of this effort, a survey was conducted to better understand the depth and breadth of digital exclusion among disadvantaged groups in the South.

This study examines the relationship between broadband adoption and county-level educational achievement in the US in which a novel measure of home broadband subscriptions to explore longitudinal community impacts of broadband adoption on aggregated standardized test scores in math and reading/language arts for students enrolled in 3rd-8th grades. A panel was created of US counties and measured the effect of broadband adoption on student educational achievement by estimating a fixed effect estimator. Key highlights from the research showed the following:

This research characterizes the state of Internet equity in Chicago (IL), focusing on different dimensions of Internet equity, including availability, affordability, and adoption. To this end, we combine multiple existing datasets to understand the digital divide in Chicago and the contributing factors. Our findings show a disparity in broadband adoption rates across neighborhoods in Chicago: Broadband adoption varies between 58--93% across community areas, with low access areas mostly concentrated in South and West Chicago.

A longstanding approach to measuring Internet performance is to directly compare throughput against pre-defined benchmarks (e.g., 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream).

Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, launched the “Black Tech Agenda." The agenda sets an affirmative vision for how to create tech policy that centers on racial justice and ensures bias and discrimination are rooted out of the digital lives of Black people and everyone. The agenda has 6 pillars that outline real policy solutions for Congress to advance racial equity in Tech:

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

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.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are community anchors with the influence and expertise that states need as they prepare for unprecedented federal broadband funding to equitably close the digital divide in the United States.

Internet service providers’ discriminatory underinvestment in broadband infrastructure and services—referred to as “digital redlining” for disproportionately affecting low-income communities of color—is drawing increased public scrutiny, including from policymakers.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded seven grants totaling over $118.8 million as part of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program. These grants will fund high-speed internet infrastructure deployment, use, and adoption projects to improve connectivity across Tribal lands. The awarded tribal lands are as follows: