Colletti worked at Denver Public Library’s central location circa 2010, in the Community Technology Center. The gig involved helping people one on one with everything from making a resume to setting up email. She also helped develop a curriculum for classes that did the same. Essentially, Colletti was doing digital inclusion and equity work before advocates even landed on those names to describe it.
Although they weren’t calling it that, Colletti says looking back now, “We were doing digital equity work all the time.”
In September, Colletti left the library for a job with the state of Colorado, an entirely new position: full-time digital equity manager. Colletti — long on the digital equity front lines — is now at the state level, helping to create a comprehensive digital inclusion plan for Colorado, built around the work’s three pillars: getting people access to the Internet, a device to use it and the skills they need to do so in a meaningful way.
And Colletti is not alone. In fact, a wave of states have recently created new full-time positions to work on digital inclusion and digital equity. A Government Technology analysis found that as many as 20 states now have full-time staffers dedicated to this, or they have added digital equity to their broadband deployment lead’s title. As recently as four years ago, that number was zero. Meanwhile, six other states have posted job openings in the past year for such positions.
There is a clear financial impetus for them to do so, to the tune of $2.75 billion, to be exact. That’s the allocation for digital equity headed down to states from the federal government through the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. To get this money, states have roughly one year to present federal decision-makers with a digital equity plan. All 50 states have applied for and received federal grants to do this.
And while many states are just putting the work into their existing broadband deployment offices, national advocates suggest not doing that, not if they want to fully satisfy federal requirements and maximize the money they receive, said Amy Huffman, policy director with the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), as well as a former full-time digital inclusion staffer with North Carolina.
“You need a digital equity person,” Huffman told Government Technology. “You can’t lump this in with deployment and expect things to get done the way Congress wants it to.”
Huffman also suggests that state view such hires as long-term, rather than as simply a staffer to get the grants. States in recent years have almost all added offices or staffers dedicated to broadband deployment, a project where progress is more tangible than with digital inclusion.
“The digital equity piece of this is going to live on beyond the deployment piece,” Huffman said. “There’s a foreseeable future where between BEAD and the capital projects, the major deployment projects are taken care of … but the digital equity piece will continue. There will continue to be a need for states to be leading in this and investing and doing all the things that states will be doing.”
The location of the new roles vary by state. Some are housed within broadband deployment offices, others in the central IT shop, and still more in other places, from economic development agencies to education to health and human services.
For the moment, though, these relatively new staffers should all be focused on the digital equity money from the federal government. There is a one-year timeline for that work, and a clock starts ticking the moment states get the planning grant. On top of that, the federal requirements demand a 30-day public comment period — many states are currently in the midst of this, conducting listening tours across their cities and towns — so that shortens the actual planning period even further.
Some states were directly inspired by this challenge to make a digital equity hire. Kansas, for example, found a new staff member to help with that work, said Jade Piros de Carvalho, the director of Kansas' Office of Broadband Development. The state had that hire in place when the federal planning grant arrived, Piros de Carvalho noted, "so they could hit the ground running."
The NDIA also predicted a need for guidance, partnering with federal reserve banks last fall to host a series of seven workshops on how to build digital equity plans. Each of these, Huffman recalls, “had someone who had just started their job in the past month, or less. Often less.”
All told, those workshops garnered participation from 41 states, as well as four territories and Washington, D.C. The NDIA has also published a state digital equity plan toolkit. The NDIA also serves as a convener, bringing together those in the space to learn from each other.
Maggie Woods is the digital equity manager with North Carolina’s Office of Digital Equity and Literacy, and she said partnering with the growing number of other people in the space has been really helpful at a time where there is much excitement but also much work to be done.
“We’re all learning together,” Woods said. “The fact that NDIA is bringing together a state cohort has just been invaluable.”
North Carolina is one of the veteran states in terms of digital inclusion and digital equity, but Woods said that while they have a very strong foundation, they can still benefit from learning from other states, even those who are much newer to the work.
That includes folks like Colletti in Colorado, and very soon it could include counterparts in New York, Connecticut, Delaware or any of the other states currently in the process of hiring or onboarding for a fast-growing position within public-sector technology.
