This newsletter contains information on:

• Net Inclusion 2022
• Progress on Digital Equity funding
• Partner Engagement

Net Inclusion 2022

Registration is open for Net Inclusion 2022  in Portland in February. Net Inclusion is the NDIA-sponsored conference bringing together people engaged in all aspects of digital equity, practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers. It has been a wonderful experience for connecting and learning from others, and PBDD encourages their partners to attend, if it is possible.

To facilitate this, PBDD has a limited number of scholarships available to assist agencies to cover the registration and a small stipend. If this would make the difference in being able to attend, please contact us.

Progress on Digital Equity Funding

After years of work and countless hours of effort, the ideas and plans engendered in the digital equity act, introduced by Senator Patty Murray in April 2019, have finally become the law of the land.  It includes $65 billion for broadband and digital equity, and is a huge step forward. Read the NDIA blog posts about the bill passing in the House,  passing the Senate, as well as the pre-passage summary of broadband aspects of the bill. Benton Institute has a great summary of the digital equity aspects of the bill, as well as a breakdown of each of the provisions.  It will take some time for the money to work its way through the state and municipal authorities to the agencies providing services, but there is help coming, and we encourage agencies to reach out to your local government’s broadband offices to work with them to ensure that the money helps the communities we serve.

To find information on the broadband office and the contacts for your state, see NTIA’s State Broadband Leaders Network page.

Partner Engagement

The past two years have been a challenge to all of us, both as individuals and as organizations. For many of our partner organizations, their day to day operation was disrupted in ways that were unimaginable prior to COVID-19. In recognition of this, and as a way to stay in contact with our partners as everyone was pivoting to provide services, PBDD has been working its way through our partner descriptions, ensuring that each matches what you have on your websites, and confirming it with our partners. We have been working our way through the alphabet, addressing two partners a month, so if we haven’t yet contacted you, you can expect to hear from us soon.

During the challenging times of the last twenty months, as our partners were shifting their typical activities to adapt to the changing environment, PBDD suspended our writing of experience papers and partner profiles. We plan to resume them in the coming months, starting with an experience paper on things that worked surprisingly well during the pandemic. So, we encourage you to start thinking about this, and we will be reaching out with a few specific questions early in 2022.

Also on our work plan for next year is to start touching base with some of our partners to start a dialogue on how PBDD can help to achieve specific goals. If your organization would like to volunteer to be one of the early participants in this conversation, we encourage you to reach out to us.