Digital Equity Resource
National Collaborative for Digital Equity (NCDE)
The National Collaborative for Digital Equity (NCDE) is a nonprofit committed to removing digital divide barriers to economic and educational opportunity for LMI learners of all ages and their families. NCDE emphasizes assessing and addressing the digital divide as a systemic digital equity challenge, and stresses that digital equity capacity building efforts in LMI communities need to be both sustained as well as in explicit support of systemic inclusion—financial, economic, educational and digital—for LMI learners of all ages and their families.
NCDE contends that resolving digital equity challenges, as crucial as this is, is nonetheless insufficient to enable LMI learners and families to move out of intergenerational poverty. NCDE organizes annual state summits that bring together state and LMI community leaders from banking, education, workforce development and philanthropy, to develop and continually strengthen local systemic inclusion efforts that begin with digital equity, but also foster financial, economic and educational inclusion. Wherever possible, NCDE points participants in its summits and webinars to already established providers of digital equity and other systemic inclusion resources but, as with e-learning badging, will undertake its own innovations to address an urgent and otherwise unmet concern.
NCDE has pioneered pilot efforts and capacity building initiatives that have enabled banking leaders
to begin earning credit under the federal Community
Reinvestment Act (CRA) for removing digital divide
barriers to economic opportunity by, for example,
investing in improved access for LMI individuals, families
and communities to broadband, devices, tech and
librarian support, and related digital equity essentials.
Banks annually spend over $480 billion to meet their
CRA requirement to support economic opportunity in
LMI areas in their service region. NCDE’s “One Percent
for Digital Equity” campaign seeks to persuade banking
leaders to voluntarily commit up to 1% of their CRA
resources for digital equity in support of systemic
(financial, economic and educational) inclusion, which
would unleash eventually close to $5 billion each year to
narrow the nation’s vexing digital divide.
Organization: National Collaborative for Digital Equity (NCDE)
Category: Broadband, Educational Content, Funding, Hardware, Libraries and Librarians, Safe and Responsible Use, Software, Tech Support
Audience: Educators, Funders, Libraries, Non-profits, Parents, Universities
Web Link: https://www.digitalequity.us
Contributor: Dr. Bob McLaughlin, NCDE executive director
Contributor Link: https://www.digitalequity.us