By Ana Martinez-Ortiz
Evan Marwell
It’s easy to assume that everyone uses the internet, but that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, not everyone has access to the internet and while some households may lack internet for personal reasons, many do so for financial ones.
EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit organization which helped bridge the classroom connectivity gap, is on a new mission: to help bridge the digital divide. The organization released its finding and solutions in its report, “No Home Left Offline,” on Thursday, Nov. 4.
In its report, the organization found that approximately 28.2 million households in the U.S. do not have high-speed broadband; of that, 18.1 million of those households cannot afford it.
Evan Marwell is the founder and CEO of EducationSuperHighway. In an interview with the Milwaukee Courier, Marwell discussed the report’s findings and how the nonprofit is suited to help lead the way on bridging the digital divide.
Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway in 2012 with the intention of connecting every public-school classroom to the internet. At the time, about 10% of students in America had access to broadband, Marwell said. By 2019, the organization took that number to 99%.
The organization worked with the federal government to ensure funding, and then connected with local government to implement access through upgrades and outreach. This effort included working with school districts and ensuring they had accurate information on topics such as costs and upgrades.
With its original mission complete, EducationSuperHighway was prepared to shut down in March 2020, but then the pandemic hit.
“They sent 50 million kids home and something like a third of them didn’t have internet access at home,” Marwell said. “Suddenly this digital divide that people have been talking about, the homework gap that people have been talking about forever, suddenly really mattered a lot.”
That’s when Marwell’s phone started ringing with calls from the government, teachers and more. The organization decided rather then shutting down, it would pivot its mission.
Over the next eight months, it connected about 3 million children to the internet.
“If you didn’t have broadband at home, you were shut out of the economy during the pandemic,” Marwell said. “You couldn’t send your kids to school, you couldn’t work remotely, you couldn’t get health care, you couldn’t get job training, you couldn’t access the social safety net and you couldn’t access government services.”
It was a wake-up call, for all Americans, on how important the internet is and the disadvantages of life without it, Marwell said. A cellphone may have internet, but it’s not the same, he added.
Many people think that the digital divide applies only to households in rural areas, Marwell said, and while that remains an issue, it’s not as big as it once was. At the moment, affordability is a bigger problem than infrastructure.
One of the solutions was the Lifeline Program, Marwell said. According to the Federal Communications Commission, it is a federal program that began in 1985 with the goal to connect phone service at a discounted price to low-income consumers, in 2016 the Lifeline Program was expanded to include broadband access.
In addition to the Lifeline Program, there was also the Emergency Broadband Benefit, which was part of the second stimulus bill introduced under former President Donald Trump. Less than 20% of the eligible households signed up for these programs, Marwell said. There were three reasons for that: eligible households didn’t know about programs; people expressed a lack of trust; and internet was needed to sign up.
Through its research and past experience, EducationSuperHighway has found several solutions, which it detailed in its “No Home Left Offline” report. One of the solutions is to use community-based organizations, which have an established trust with residents. This involves giving community-based organizations the tools to connect their residents to the internet. Another solution is to install free Wi-Fi networks in low-income apartment buildings.
“Those are the two principal solutions that we think can be replicated and scaled across the country,” Marwell said. “That’s part of the work we’re doing now.”
In the next 18 months, the organization will be working to ensure that the policies and funding are in place to begin implementing programs. Marwell estimates it will take about five years to scale up nationally.
To start with, the campaign will focus on the nation’s most unconnected communities. Those are places where 25% or more households lack internet access. Milwaukee is one such unconnected community, Marwell said, as 80,000 households or roughly 35% don’t have internet access.
“Milwaukee is going to be place that’s going to be a priority for us,” Marwell said. “But it’s not just Milwaukee, it’s urban, it’s suburban, it’s small towns. This is a problem everywhere, and we want to focus on those places where at least 25% of the households don’t have internet access.”
The internet is transformational, he said, and people use it to make their lives better.
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to really make progress in closing the digital divide,” Marwell said. “We got this opportunity, and we need to take advantage of it.”
To learn more about EducationSuperHighway, visit its website at www.educationsuperhighway.org.