The Slice: How to wire rural America

Digital Inclusion

Designing Scalable Co-Funding Solutions for Broadband and Digital Equity

One can dispute the “slower pace” cliché of rural life, but there’s one aspect in which it is demonstrably and devastatingly true: Internet speeds. Broadband is expensive to install, and that’s especially true where front doors can be miles apart.?

Closing this digital divide for rural communities is one of the big goals of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which made federal funding available for high-speed broadband internet. Over the next five years, $62.4B has been set aside explicitly to address rural connectivity gaps.

Recently, the Rural Opportunity and Development Sessions (ROADS) collaboration—of which the Institute’s Community Strategies Group is a founder—hosted a panel to help rural communities understand and participate in the new federal funding available for high-speed broadband internet.

A video of that meeting is now available, along with a summary and two main takeaways.?

The takeaways:

• Broadband Presents Unique Capacity Challenges Compared to Other Rural Investments. “Despite significant improvements to federal broadband availability datasets, local communities—and individual residents—will have to self-advocate to ensure available public funding reaches every unconnected home,” says the post. “Every community in the country will encounter ‘embedded digital inequity,’ where neighboring houses on the same block have access to different levels of service—or no access.” And even with “last mile” dollars allocated, providers aren’t financially motivated to improve service to a community that has some degree of service.
• Entry Points and No Dead Ends: The panel also noted a specific role for philanthropy and adjacent funders. “The process-driven stakeholder engagement and long timelines that constitute successful broadband deployment can, in themselves, provide the architecture for a new civic agenda,” the blog reports. “Highly technical broadband projects cannot and should not be separated from the civic, institutional, and capacity challenges rural communities that need broadband also face.”

Read more about the panel here.

Equitable Employment

Employer as Validator: Challenges in Verifying Skills and Experience

Here at The Slice, we love directing attention to the promise of LER systems—the Learning and Employment Records that keep track of learning and allow it to be validated, recorded, and leveraged throughout a person’s work life. These systems mean that an investment made in skills, knowledge, and experiences retain their value as workers move from job to job. At the Institute, Haley Glover of UpSkill America—an initiative of the Economic Opportunities Program—researches and publishes frequently on the topic.?

In Employer as Validator: Challenges in Verifying Skills and Experience, Glover addresses the role that employers can take in validating and verifying learning and experiences, in much the same way that education providers do for degrees and certifications. “That role—employer as verifier—is both a linchpin in enabling all learning to count and a potential barrier,” she writes.??

While noting that every employer is different, and that each will have its own set of blockades, the publication covers four classes of barriers that advocates of LER will face—legal, alignment, financial, and competitive—and offers strategies for getting around them.?

Read the publication here.

Climate Economics

Aspen Ideas: Climate

The world (or at least some of it) is marshaling its forces to battle the climate crisis and adapt to its life-altering effects. We’ll need armies of scientists, communicators, advocates, policymakers, industrialists, and dreamers—and like every army, it will require massive amounts of funding.

At Aspen Ideas: Climate, gathering this March 11-13 in Miami Beach, economic concerns will take the stage with a program track called “Financing the Future.” A series of panels will answer questions from “How are we going to pay for this?” to “How do we make sure no one gets left behind?” and the hundreds of other financial issues in between.

Of particular note is the Sharing the Wealth of the Energy Transition session, hosted by Ida Rademacher of the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. This public panel discussion will explore how building new power-generating assets can both transform the energy system and create wealth for the communities around them.?

Since our last reporting, Aspen Ideas: Climate has posted a full (but still growing) agenda.

Find out more here.