June 2023

Verizon Executive Details Pennsylvania Funding Win, Company Also Gets Virginia Money

Verizon won broadband funding from two Pennsylvania counties recently. Verizon Vice President of Business Operations for Wireline Networks Doug Sullivan offered details about the wins, which are for areas where the company has begun deploying its Fios fiber broadband service. The Pennsylvania awards were for Washington and Westmoreland counties.

Washington County (ME) will help launch National Digital Navigators Corps

Susan Corbett, the founder of Maine’s National Digital Equity Center (NDEC), lives in one of America’s most remote rural regions. The population density is under 10 people per square mile. She knows first-hand how fast her community can tumble without a safety net. When the pandemic’s shelter-in-place order went into effect in 2020, Corbett and her team witnessed the severe isolation and loneliness of many elderly people in her community. The Digital Equity Center responded quickly.

'Quietly left behind': Escaping a go-nowhere job in rural Washington County starts with speedy internet

Computer Reach, which employs 24 full and part-time employees and has an annual budget of $580,000, provides refurbished laptops and computer literacy training to people most in need. Richard King Mellon Foundation, PNC Foundation, Eden Hall Foundation, EQT Foundation, and Pittsburgh Foundation are among Computer Reach’s supporters. The need for laptops in poor areas far outstrips the availability of computers: social service agencies identified some 2,500 candidates for Computer Reach’s computers and digital help, but the nonprof

#BlackLivesMatter Turns 10

In July 2013, activists first used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to spark conversation about racism, violence and the criminal justice system following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Ten years later, Black Lives Matter stands as a model of a new generation of social movements intrinsically linked to social media.