Why Attend?

This is not your traditional sit-and-get conference

• Those developing State digital equity plans have so little time to do need-sensing with “covered populations” (cf. slide #9) for their proposals just to be eligible for $1+ billion in USDOC funding to States over the next four years. Summit participants, tools & resources will help you.
• The Digital Equity Act allows and urges inclusive development of State plans that impact both the digital divide and poverty – but it doesn’t guarantee these outcomes.

The Atlanta summit will assist State planners, state and local DEI leaders, and those leading digital, financial, economic and educational inclusion initiatives, to develop integrated plans leading to sustained impact on the digital divide and poverty.

In Atlanta, State planners will learn about and connect with DEI and inclusion leaders to more rapidly and inclusively complete required need-sensing with covered populations.

Equally, inclusion and DEI leaders can better inform, shape, implement, formatively assess and hold accountable your State’s plan for real impact on poverty.

At the summit, you’ll learn about and engage with those who can help you:

• Learn how to use the free Inclusion Junction networking tool to bring State planning, DEI and inclusion leaders together to more rapidly and inclusively develop your State’s four-year plan and funding request.
• Get every household “banked” with a low-cost or free checking account with no bounced-check or other fees. (Roughly 6% of US households are unbanked or underbanked, relying instead on payday lenders and check-cashing predators, spending as much as 10% of their income on avoidable fees. The vast majority of these households are in low-income communities.)
• Mobilize, train and institutionalize an army of bank volunteers to develop financial literacy skills for all middle and high school students, financial aid applicants, and those in apprenticeship and workforce programs leading to their first living-wage paycheck.
• Much more cost-effectively coordinate outreach to lower-income households and communities statewide, to assist them to become fully banked, enrolled in deeply discounted and free device and broadband access, multilingual tech support and digital navigator, and tax preparation programs.
• Ensure every household knows why and how to obtain a library card and tap public libraries’extraordinary resources and personalized reference desk support for safe & effective searching.
• Develop a sustained statewide ecosystem for fully refurbishing computers and putting them into the hands of low-income learners of all ages at no cost, in partnership with state and federal poverty relief programs, philanthropic, financial aid, and bank Community Reinvestment Act funders.
• Meet partners ready to help your State cost-effectively develop and sustain apprenticeship and workforce development programs that:
• Diversify the state’s K12 workforce, with powerful impacts on learning climate, engagement and results for diverse learners.
• Diversify the state’s banking workforce, significantly improving equitable access to and adoption of banking services, capital and credit, technical assistance for women- and minority-owned businesses, home ownership, and asset building.
• Assist your state with the daunting but essential paradigm shift in K12 education and educator preparation from conventional lecture/quiz/standardized test-based teaching to competency-based learning facilitation, assessment and badging. We know that prevailing K12 practices disadvantage diverse and low-income learners. For economic inclusion gains at scale, rethinking K12 and educator preparation is as essential as digital literacy and inclusion.
• Explore whether and how best to create a new or enhance an existing statewide portal pointing low-income individuals, families and communities and those who serve them to resources across essential inclusion dimensions (digital, financial, economic, educational…), in partnership with 211 Help Desk and other resource referral initiatives.
• Develop long-term strategic partnerships between your State’s bank Community Reinvestment compliance leaders and digital inclusion leaders, to sustain and scale support for systemic inclusion long after federal USDOC digital equity funding expires.