MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google Fiber, in partnership with the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), is launching the Digital Inclusion Fellowship. The fellowship will pair 16 people with local community organizations in our eight Google Fiber metro areas—Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Kansas City, Nashville, Provo, Raleigh-Durham and Salt Lake City — where they’ll spend a year building a digital inclusion program from the ground up.
When people have access to the web, opportunities are just a click away — from learning how to sign up for health care, to finding affordable housing, to keeping in touch with family and friends. But today, more than 60 million Americans still aren’t using the Internet at home. While there are organizations across the U.S. that want to help bring these people online, many of them don’t have the in-house expertise or resources to launch new programs.
This fellowship will help community organizations get more people connected to the web. For example, the Salt Lake Education Foundation’s fellows will teach parents how to communicate with their children’s teachers and access grades and attendance records online. Meanwhile Triangle Literacy Council’s fellow will create a mobile computing lab, which will travel to libraries, community centers, jails, and schools to teach people basic online tasks, like sending emails or finding health clinics.
Building Effective Digital Inclusion Programs
NTEN will choose fellows from their local community, since they’ll know what kinds of programs will work best in their city. Once selected, they’ll travel to Google’s offices in Mountain View, Calif., to receive specialized training from NTEN on how to build effective digital inclusion programs. And throughout the fellowship, Google Fiber will provide approximately $1 million to support salaries and benefits for fellows, and stipends to organizations so they have the resources to launch their new programs.
Interested residents can applications apply at nten.org/community/dif through June 10, 2015.
