To prevent that, a new job has arisen — the digital navigator. A digital navigator is a trusted community guide who helps people keep up with the digital world, specifically with getting affordable Internet, devices to access it and training to use it in meaningful ways. The job became common after the pandemic, and since then, it too has started to change.
Angela Siefer is the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), the nation’s foremost nonprofit group in digital inclusion and equity. The NDIA runs a digital navigator working group with more than 500 members. The group is currently grappling with several big issues: changes to federal funding for Internet access, artificial intelligence tools becoming part of life and the need to effectively tell their own stories so people in power understand their importance, among other things.
“It’s really amazing how much it’s taken off and resonated with communities,” Siefer says of digital navigator jobs. “It’s in state digital equity plans. There’s efforts to provide training at the state level. There’s definitely growth.”
To understand the growth of digital navigators as well as the changing landscape in which they work, let’s look at the stories of individual digital navigators themselves, spread across the country.

EveryoneOn
KENTUCKY
Ashley Smith is a digital navigator for the nonprofit group Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR), located in eastern Kentucky. Smith is, in fact, the lone digital navigator for 54 counties spread across hills and valleys and mountainsides in a region with a storied history in coal mining. Sometimes, finding cell service can be a struggle, let alone reliable high-speed Internet.
“Every county is different, but the story is the same — we have people who cannot get adequate health care, education, or work because they have been left behind in the digital age,” says Smith, who was born in the region and still lives there.
Smith’s work illustrates how digital navigators do much more than just teach people to use computers, or sign up for affordable Internet, although she does do those things. But Smith has two types of days on the job: digital skills days and project days.
On digital skills days, Smith drives her gray 2009 Ford Focus — gifted to her years ago with low mileage — sometimes as many as 250 miles. She might hold three or four classes in one day at different places, often taking U.S. Route 23 — known colloquially as the Country Music Highway — between her appointments.
She schedules classes a month in advance, so attendees can plan accordingly, and when the day comes, she passes out free devices, holds lessons about things like setting up a profile on LinkedIn and then heads off to her next site. On these days, she generally leaves home at 8:30 a.m., and doesn’t return until as late as 7:30 p.m., listening to audiobooks like The Hobbit to pass the time behind the wheel.
Sometimes her classes are small, held in schools or career centers or drug rehabilitation centers, in towns that don’t even have a stoplight.
“It doesn’t matter that it’s small, it doesn’t matter if I only have two clients every time I go,” Smith says. “I go, and I make a difference. I will go for everybody and anybody as long as I have the time.”
It’s her project days that are perhaps more telling about the way digital navigator work is changing. On those days, she doesn’t leave home at all. She holds Zoom meetings primarily focused on regional workforce development. She helps communities and other groups that have received grants for high-speed Internet to develop broadband plans, coordinate with Internet service providers and build connections.
“You see more and more of navigators having to be advocates for their community,” Smith says. “Because SOAR has a 54-county region, I have a lot to advocate.”
But the work is key to the region’s future. The promise of better Internet fueled by her project days can eventually help people get new jobs in the digital economy. It can keep them from having to move from the area where they were raised. It’s so important, in fact, that Smith says she might not be the lone digital navigator in the region much longer, with SOAR planning to hire others to join her. That could mean she can hold more classes in fewer places, reducing the amount of time she spends in the car.

EveryoneOn
PHILADELPHIA
While Smith is covering almost half the state of Kentucky, more densely populated areas often have several digital navigators. Philadelphia, for example, coordinates a network of digital navigator organizations from within the city’s Office of Innovation and Technology, says Juliet Fink-Yates, the city’s broadband and digital inclusion manager.
The network is made up of four organizations, all of which offer digital navigator services and personnel for different communities throughout the city. And while the work on the ground is ever-changing for individuals, it’s also changing for the programs, program managers and the local governments that support them.
A major change of late, Fink-Yates says, is the end of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which helped people in need get affordable Internet. As it was winding down, the city took action and worked with its digital navigator network, contacting thousands of households to let them know the benefit was ending and prices were going to go up. It was difficult to find a way to offset the cost, but they let them know navigators could help them through it, maybe even setting up access through city hot spots that were part of a different program.
As that situation and others like it continue to change, the city meets with its digital navigator groups every other week, offering them support and connecting them with each other, too.
“They’re on the ground,” Fink-Yates says, “and in some ways they lift up the challenges they have with each other.”
Kevin Young has worked in community outreach for years, primarily in West Philadelphia, where he is originally from. He first became aware of digital equity as an issue while doing outreach with Drexel University’s West Philadelphia Promise Neighborhood program.
Promise Neighborhood is focused on education, and Young used to knock on doors and ask people if they had an hour to answer a full set of questions. There was nothing directly about digital equity in the questions he asked them, but the topic inevitably started to come up.
He and his interviewees would develop a familiarity, and eventually, they would tell him about their struggles to use computers or the Internet. Young heard about problems sending emails, figuring out how to add attachments or interfacing online with doctors.
“It was just too difficult, and these are very basic things,” Young says. “I realized then the need was there — it would always come up in a conversation.”
Now, Young is a full-time digital navigator working in the same community for Drexel University’s ExCITe Center, which is part of Philadelphia’s digital navigator network. Young, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, brings to the role his previous work experience in executive-level sales, marketing and public relations. That’s how he learned his way around computers, particularly business programs, including email, PowerPoint, Excel and others.
He’s been a digital navigator for a little over a year, and he holds events in West Philadelphia where members of the community can get help with digital skills training. People can also call to get individual help from him for their technology challenges. What Young’s work amounts to is helping people in need get a new job, see their doctor, show their kids how to navigate online homework or overcome other long-held frustrations.
“This is not rocket science and we’re not doing surgery,” Young says, “but when someone comes to you and tells you that you made an actual impact on their lives … that’s uplifting, the kind of thing that gives you a reason to keep going.”
Change, of course, is present in all of Young’s work. A key part of being a digital navigator is being able to dole out assistance from a place of trust. In many ways, the ideal digital navigator
is equal parts expert and neighbor. This is certainly true, Young says, with many of the residents of West Philadelphia, where gentrification and a changing city can make people wary of outsiders. They are often approached by developers who want to buy their property out from under them. As a digital navigator, he says it is important to keep his word and show people the services they offer really are beneficial.
And he also has to keep teaching himself new things every day. Young tries to reach 100 percent of the community in West Philadelphia, including veterans, seniors, returning citizens coming home after long-term incarceration and the sight-impaired, among others. Recently, he learned how to use a new program that functions as a screen reader for the sight-impaired, so that he could instruct those in need on how to use it.
“We don’t shy away from any particular category,” Young says. “Whatever it is we don’t know, we acquire the knowledge to learn.”

Drexel University
LOS ANGELES
But not all densely populated areas are the same either. While they bear similarities, digital inclusion work in Philadelphia may have different strengths and areas of focus than digital inclusion work in Los Angeles County.
Rebecca Kauma is the director of digital equity for Los Angeles County, which is home to nearly 10 million residents, making it the most populous county in the nation. There are more people in Los Angeles County — a roughly 4,700 square foot area — than there are in 40 individual states. And Kauma is the first person to ever hold the digital equity director role for the jurisdiction. She’s been in the job since 2023, and in that time, of course, there has been change.
One of the things Kauma is helping the cities, communities and organizations in her jurisdiction with of late is applying for assistance through the federal Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, a $1.25 billion pot of funding administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). One of the things the NTIA is looking for in applications is partnerships, a criteria that Los Angeles County is very well suited for, given its size and shared community interest. And so the county took on the role of lead applicant. As of press time, they were awaiting word on whether they would receive funding.
“All this work is very much built by collaboration and partnerships,” Kauma says. “We’re making sure we’re meeting our community organizations and others where they are at.”
The goal for the application was to include a diverse group of stakeholders that accurately reflected the community, including local governments, community-based organizations, nonprofit groups, public libraries and school districts, among others. One of the groups the county worked with is Everyone On, a digital inclusion organization that helps the underserved community in the Los Angeles metro area.
Oscar Magaña is the group’s senior programs manager, a job he’s held for the past three years, helping to shape the assistance that digital navigators give to the community. Magaña grew up in southeast Los Angeles, and he says the families that Everyone On helps often remind him of his own family.
As a young boy he often helped his parents and grandparents program their VCRs, or set up their first cellphones. Now he’s working for a group that does that on a community-wide scale. Part of his job is to help set up devices before digital skills training sessions. And, as with other digital inclusion folks across the country, he’s seen changes to the work in the time he’s been doing it.
Namely, these days many of the people the group serves have started to ask about artificial intelligence. They want to know what it is, how it works and how they can start using it to help with things in their lives. As a program manager, Magaña says the need is clear, and so now the work becomes figuring out how their group can help people benefit from responsible use of AI, rather than be harmed or left behind by it.
And to do that, they’ll draw from the digital navigator playbook — meeting people in communities with experts they can trust. Magaña recalls a recent event in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood where a digital skills instructor had grown up nearby. The rapport with the people who came for help was instant.
“It just makes the participants more engaged when they know the people working with them are also from the community — their community,” Magaña says. “They trust them.”

SOAR
GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY
The evolving work of the digital navigator — from AI to the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program to new ways to go about relationship building — will likely be topics of discussion at this year’s Net Inclusion, an NDIA-hosted event that ranks as the nation’s foremost gathering of digital inclusion practitioners. It’s slated for May at the Gila River Indian Community, which is near Phoenix.
And Gila River itself is no stranger to digital inclusion work, home as it is to the Digital Connect Initiative, a program run by Gila River Telecommunications Inc., a local Internet service provider.
Mikhail Sundust is the executive director of Digital Connect, a role he’s held for nearly three years, taking it on soon after the outbreak of the pandemic. Digital Connect currently has one digital navigator, Tyler Smith, and Sundust says he is meeting with clients constantly, seeing dozens each month.
While the Gila River digital inclusion program needs to expand in all areas, Sundust said one entirely new thing they would certainly benefit from is more digital navigators. They continue to learn new things about the role, about how to better serve their community and about the changing nature of digital inclusion work overall.
“We have the benefit that we’re not scrambling now,” Sundust says. “We have time to think things through. The pandemic response had to be immediate. Now, we get to take time with the clients and learn.”
Technology has changed so much in recent years, and it’s not stopping. The work a digital navigator does today may not have much in common with the work they do next decade. But the job is not just helping people learn to use email. The job is to manage change itself, to earn the trust of the community and to help people keep pace with the world, regardless of who they are or where they come from.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.