Doing Our Part to Support Effective Partnerships

There’s an often-quoted proverb that, while unclear in its origins, captures the significance of connection and collaboration that underpins FirstNet: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

While we do like to move fast when appropriate, the together part is critically important, as evidenced in our buildout of rural broadband, for example. The FirstNet team recognizes the importance of how working together can connect disparate entities and make them both more efficient and effective. We work on bridging these specialized connections that help people and departments modernize, think differently and transform.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

By coordinating with big organizations, like the FBI and many of the nation’s largest public safety organizations, we can capture the innovation and creative thinking from these resources and share them more broadly. And by working with small, rural or tribal organizations, we can better shape solutions and tailor innovations to meet diverse needs. Everyone benefits when innovation flows through the country—and FirstNet can be a leading conduit.

There is a clear, direct impact of these partnerships. By sharing best practices, promoting new ideas and spreading innovation broadly—through seminars, consortiums and other forums for learning—no organization has to learn things the hard way. Departments don’t all have to run into the same roadblocks or make do with less-efficient models. This collaboration can save lives and help communities everywhere.

Across U.S. tribal lands, managing the COVID-19 pandemic remains a logistical challenge. From coordinating delivery of food, medical supplies and treatment to hard-hit tribal communities, to ensuring pervasive safety messaging, to operating testing and vaccination centers, FirstNet’s deployment of portable cell sites, networking solutions and devices equipped with Enhanced Push-To-Talk are critical in effective pandemic response. These tools enable vital connection and coordination across agencies, jurisdictions, teams, languages, communities and sites.

It’s not only the smaller, rural or tribal communities that benefit from innovative collaboration. Recently, in working with one major police department, some FirstNet team members asked about the best way to help. We thought it would involve developing a complex application for situational awareness and disaster response navigation.

In reality, the department had just gone through an exhaustive exercise involving relocating a homeless population from a public park, an effort that involved several hundred officers. And all of those officers had to traverse a paper-based system for registering, checking in and clearing the grounds afterward—placing massive demand on staff and raising security risks from inefficient tracking capabilities. They just needed a modern application to allow for check-in and awareness using their FirstNet devices.

If this was the case in one of our country’s biggest police departments, can you imagine how teams manage significant events in smaller communities?

That’s something we’re working to address further, including by creating a “sandbox” for public safety innovators—like first responders transforming their toolsets—to work together with an ecosystem of industry experts and contributors from academia in developing new capabilities. The sandbox provides a safe, lab-like space for trying out new technologies and approaches, assessing needs and developing solutions around those needs.

The combination of public safety coming together with industry leaders and technology, along with college students and teachers and their desire to contribute to the public safety mission, is a beautiful illustration of partnership at work. In leading this public-private partnership, we’re connecting to all of these entities, which will help us expand, scale, go viral and spread the dividends as widely as possible.

These are just a few examples—other notable cases include working with the FBI in training to thwart cyberattacks, with the DHS Science & Technology directorate on conflict resolution strategies and with FEMA on COVID-19 response and vaccination—but they underscore the heart of the mission. Partnerships aren’t just convenient or necessary; they’re an avenue for all of us to learn from each other and a strategy that benefits everyone, from first responders to the public they serve. We are proud of the work we’ve done so far, and we can’t wait to see what this forward momentum brings next.