In many parts of rural and tribal America, upwards of 21 percent of the population lack broadband access, and the obstacles to installing and preparing people to use broadband in rural America are high and complex, in spite of unprecedented federal support. LISC has been helping local nonprofits, as well as town, county and tribal governments, to leverage public capital and get connectivity, digital devices and training into local places and the hands of residents. The upshot is more people and regional economies accessing business, educational and social opportunities that are imperative for life in the 21st century.
Photo above: A cybersecurity summer training program for Choctaw youth. Image courtesy of the Choctaw Office of Economic Development.
People in rural Macon County, AL, are connected to one another by their neighborly Southern culture and by the area’s storied history as a cradle of Black higher education and civil rights activity. But the county’s 19,000 or so residents are definitely not well connected via the internet.
One in three county residents has no wired or fixed-wireless internet connection, and for others the connection isn’t fast or reliable enough to accomplish what they need to do. This has been a problem for years. The dearth of connectivity at key industrial sites and Interstate exits, for example, has made it harder for Joe Turnham, longtime director of the Macon County Economic Development Authority (MCEDA), to bring new employers and taxpayers to the county, which has a poverty rate of 27.5 percent and a shrinking tax base.
During the pandemic, when everyday life migrated online, Macon County’s connectivity gap came into even sharper focus. “Work from home,” for many, meant watching the loading icon on their screens “just spin and spin and spin,” as one resident of the town of Notasulga lamented, or driving to a gas station or fast-food parking lot to get Wi-Fi. The school district had worked hard to integrate technology into its curricula and, with a grant from Apple, distribute tablets to students, nearly all of whom qualify for free lunch. But with 2020’s shift to remote schooling it had to scramble to supply families with hotspots and wire school buses for the many kids who lacked internet access at home.
Then-superintendent Jaqueline Brooks, a Macon County native, was frustrated. People need to understand that internet access is “a necessary utility today,” she told news outlet AL.com. “It should be provided everywhere in the United States of America without exception.”
Two and a half years later, that critical utility is coming to Macon County. Internet service provider Point Broadband is now at work laying 60 miles of new fiber in a scalable, state-of-the-art network that will serve sites crucial for economic development as well as some 1,500 homes and businesses along the route and a host of community anchors like libraries and health and educational institutions.
Indeed, across the nation the push is on to accomplish the universal coverage Americans need and deserve. The Biden administration’s infrastructure plan dedicates an unprecedented $100 billion to expand broadband access and close the digital divide that disproportionately leaves rural places, communities of color, and low-income people without a service that’s nearly as indispensable to modern life as electricity or running water.
Universal broadband access is a kind of force multiplier for rural—accelerating economic development, education, health care, emergency preparedness and social connection. Since mid-2020, Rural LISC has deployed some $3 million to both help build broadband infrastructure and impart the skills to use it, investments that in turn have leveraged tens of millions of public dollars. (On top of that investment, LISC’s subsidiary, the New Markets Support Company, last year committed $8.5 million to broadband infrastructure in predominantly Native rural communities in Alaska). “Where market forces have not resulted in adequate service, we want to be part of the solution,” says Christa Vinson, who leads broadband efforts for Rural LISC.
With local communities at the center of infrastructure investment decisions for the first time, following the largest federal broadband funding program in history, the potential for universal connectivity across rural America is tantalizingly within reach.
For each community, a hill to climb
But despite the deluge of public funds—and broad public support for broadband investments—getting infrastructure projects off the ground and residents connected presents a complex challenge for local governments.
Led by MCEDA, the various funding sources for Macon County’s $3.1 million effort hints at this complexity. The project cobbles together major state grants, equity from Georgia-based Point, a $250,000 grant from Rural LISC, financing from digital-equity impact investor Connect Humanity, and in-kind contributions from a local public water and power provider, the Utilities Board of Tuskegee, which agreed to waive fees for readying poles for fiber installation. The LISC money, says Turnham acts as a kind of credit enhancement (or “earnest money”) to the other capital, which in turn the county collateralized with a severance tax on sand and gravel trucked out of the county for private gain. “I mean, we truly had to get creative,” says Kathy Stewart, a former head of broadband efforts for the State of Alabama who’s worked hand in hand with Turnham as a consultant.
To expand their networks, local governments not only have to come up with substantial matching funds, but also marshal considerable technical expertise, bring together stakeholders, and often make a business case to for-profit internet service providers. They’ve also got to think about uptake and equitable access once the infrastructure is in place.
This is where philanthropies, impact investors, and intermediaries like LISC can fruitfully join the effort. “When we work with a community, we’re helping them think through the full value stream,” says Vinson. “Is the infrastructure available? Is it universally available? Is it affordable? Do people have the skills and comfort level to use the technology to move forward in life?”
With $2 million from the Truist Foundation, Rural LISC comes alongside local sponsors like Macon County’s MCEDA to brainstorm, build trust among diverse partners, and provide strategic funding that helps push local broadband infrastructure projects to realization. In addition LISC’s Digital Connector curriculum is being used by 55 organizations in 21 states; it trains public-facing staff at trusted local organizations to assist community members in getting affordable internet service and devices, along with the digital training they may need to take advantage of the technology.
Affordability equals access in rural Mississippi
For the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (MBCI), which represents eight communities on 35,000 acres of Tribal lands scattered across east-central Mississippi, the enduring challenge has been that no private internet service provider could pencil out a project to expand broadband infrastructure serving the reservation. “It's a rural area,” says John Hendrix, director of the Choctaw Office of Economic Development, “so it's expensive to deploy broadband when your homes are spread apart. And you've got a low-income community, so they're not going to pay [for high-cost service] and they're not able to pay a price to offset the cost of building it out.”
Today work is underway to build 524 miles of new fiber that will make broadband available to six unconnected Tribal communities—2,190 households, 86 businesses, 8 Tribal schools, and 52 other government buildings—free or at low cost.
The solution here was two-fold. MBCI applied for and won in August 2022 an $8.4 million Tribal Broadband Connectivity grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to build out the network in partnership with an existing provider, MaxxSouth Broadband. And MBCI agreed to apply for status as a federal Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC), which enables the Tribe to offer discounts of up to $75 a month for internet service to qualifying households through the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). With these resources in place, both the build-out and ongoing operations are adequately subsidized.
The Choctaws’ plan “is future-proof, in a way,” observes Rural LISC’s Vinson. “MaxxSouth is a going-concern company that’s going to maintain its network. So the reliable technology that’s now available will continue to be reliable and, thanks to the Tribe’s input, also affordable.
“It’s what rural places deserve—the same level of service you’d expect in a dense urban neighborhood is available here—and it’s bringing the future with it,” she added.
Rural LISC’s role, after building a relationship with Tribal leadership and learning about priorities and needs, was to provide $125,000 for a grant writer and consultant with broadband expertise to help MBCI apply for the federal grant. LISC will also work closely with MBCI on its extensive plans for digital upskilling. That includes training the Tribal government’s social workers as digital navigators. “They're the most active in supporting households that are in need,” explains Hendrix, “and they work most closely with the elderly population. Many of the elders only speak Choctaw, so the hurdle that we had to figure out was who could actually provide cyber-awareness training in Choctaw.”
A hometown foundation takes bold action for broadband
In central Virginia, The Cameron Foundation, a regional place-based philanthropy, has stepped up in a big way to help make universal broadband coverage a reality across Dinwiddie and Sussex counties, home to some 40,000 people dispersed over a thousand square miles. This project will ultimately connect 9,000 unserved households.
The foundation spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during the pandemic to purchase hotspots and Chromebooks for regional schools. It was looking for a more durable solution when Rural LISC’s Vinson reached out to Jerry Kuthy, a program officer at Cameron.
Together, using $50,000 from LISC to support technical assistance, they stood up a broad “learning circle” of local and regional stakeholders they called the Greater Petersburg Broadband Task Force (for the small city of Petersburg, where Cameron is based). “In the middle of us getting together and talking about these broadband issues,” Kuthy recalls, “something extraordinary happened.” That is, the Virginia legislature poured $700 million in COVID relief funds into a broadband program called the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative (VATI). “We viewed this as, frankly, a generational opportunity to go for getting Dinwiddie and Sussex completely covered by broadband in that one year, to lock in the funding for it,” says Kuthy.
To win two VATI grants totalling $12.4 million, Cameron kicked in $1.15 million in matching funds—a huge investment for the small organization—alongside contributions from the two counties to meet the state grant program’s requirements, and nonprofit equity from the provider, Prince George Electric Cooperative. Construction began last summer and is slated for completion by the end of this year, a game-changer for rural communities where up to a third of residents have been without broadband access.
The Greater Petersburg Broadband Task Force, meanwhile, continues its work to increase broadband access and usage in the region. One member, Virginia State University (VSU), recently won a $2.79 million NTIA Connecting Minority Communities grant that will allow the historically Black university in Petersburg to upgrade its on-campus broadband infrastructure, distribute laptops to incoming freshmen, and use LISC’s Digital Connector program to enhance digital know-how in the surrounding community.
Playing the long game in Macon County
Macon County also has created a member association whose objective is to both build on its new fiber network—eventually connecting the most remote rural households—and advance community adoption and digital skills.
With a 2022 grant from LISC, one coalition member, Macon-Russell Community Action Agency, has trained its staff as digital navigators and also provided digital-skills training and tablets to families in the Macon County’s Head Start preschool. “I understand the power of early learning, the power of getting them young and instituting these skills,” says agency director Angel Walker. She’s now augmenting that effort by reaching out to local elder facilities, churches, and mental-health organizations to offer tablets and upskilling.
Just as important—and in a far-sighted step for a private service provider—in October, Point Broadband signed a community benefits agreement with MCEDA, taking on commitments that acknowledge the county’s investment in the network. (Point Broadband is one of the internet providers in Microsoft’s Airband network helping to bring more coverage to the Black rural South and globally. Rural LISC is a Microsoft grantee.) In this contract, Point pledges to report on broadband usage, actively promote the FCC’s internet-service subsidy to customers, and provide free broadband to a list of community anchor institutions. “This public-private partnership is forward-looking and responsive to community needs, and that’s precisely what we at Rural LISC want to promote,” says Vinson. “We find ways to add capacity and create long-term processes that will continue to pay dividends for communities.”
With Macon County’s new infrastructure now coming into use, the long-term pay-off is already clear, in ways that impact the entire regional culture and economy, in addition to individual lives. For example Tuskegee University, the historically Black institution based in the county seat of Tuskegee, now boasts a brand new virtual health-care station where students and the general public can get convenient primary care—possible only because of powerful new broadband technology.
And after a recruitment process lasting more than a year, Turnham and colleagues have scored a major win for the county. Korean auto parts maker Samkee announced in February it will build a manufacturing facility at newly wired Tuskegee Commerce Park. “Samkee took on a multi-state, multi-community site search,” Turnham says. “So we were competing for this, and without world-class connectivity, you really can’t play.” The plant will bring 170 jobs at an average wage of $20.50 an hour plus benefits, and generate $1.3 million annually in taxes to support schools and other county services.
Remember that Notasulga resident who’s had to watch her cursor uselessly spin and spin? Her name is Tina Vazin; she sits on MCEDA’s board and also chairs the psychology department at historically Black Alabama State University in nearby Montgomery. With her residence newly linked to Point Broadband’s fiber network, she says, “I can hold Zoom meetings all day every day, without any disconnection. I can do most anything working from home now. And we’re hoping this will make our county more attractive for people from metropolitan areas who might want to move to a rural community.”
