Opportunity Fund Fellowship
Marjorie & Charles Benton Opportunity Fund
We launched the fund in honor of the lifelong commitments and contributions of Marjorie and the late Charles to support a stronger, more equitable, and more just America.
The fund will advance fast, fair, and open broadband for everyone in the U.S.
We’re building a generation of scholars, practitioners, and advocates; funding critical research about the future of the internet in our communities; and creating the resources and strategies any state or community can use to bring broadband to everyone.
The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society welcomes fellowship applications from a new generation of broadband scholars, practitioners, and advocates. We are interested in supporting a range of projects that can better inform our current or emerging broadband policy debates, either through critical research about the future of the internet in our communities or the development of best practices and tools to advance our field’s work. We welcome submissions from people working on broadband access, adoption, and application and are especially interested in projects that focus on what the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act identifies as "covered populations"—those historically marginalized communities that have disproportionately experienced digital inequity.
The annual call for applications will open July 2024. For questions, please reach out to fellowships@benton.org.
Dr. Revati Prasad is the Benton Institute's Vice President of Programs. In this role, Dr. Prasad recruits and manages a diverse cohort of fellows—researchers, advocates, and practitioners—and their projects. In addition, she leads Benton's research efforts and helps develop resources and strategies any state or community can use to bring broadband to everyone.
Six fellows from our inaugural cohort are conducting research and developing best practice guidance for our field. They profiled community champions who successfully addressed broadband needs, highlighted the broadband adoption journeys of low-income women of color, and evaluated the work of digital navigators within healthcare settings. We also supported projects that focused on online safety, privacy, and well-being within the context of digital equity efforts, documented the effort to build a community network in affordable housing developments in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, and studied the impact of subsidized broadband programs in assisting low-income families to afford broadband connections.
Read about the six fellows and their projects here.
From our 2023 application cycle, we have established two research groups that bring together related projects in order to share approaches and insights and foster collaboration among digital equity researchers.
The Policies, Plans, and Promises Research Group will analyze the deployment and digital equity plans that states are developing under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to examine how states are approaching specific issues, including Community Anchor Institutions (CAIs) and tribal nations. These comparative analyses will surface best practices and provide examples for how state governments can do better.
The Equitable Broadband in Urban America Research Group brings together researchers from five major U.S. cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Antonio, and Seattle) to work independently— and in concert—to examine critical broadband issues such as deployment patterns, affordability measures, and digital navigation.The projects will seek to answer the following overarching research questions:
- What puts high-quality internet access out of reach for urban America? Who is excluded?
- How has the history of racial discrimination and digital redlining influenced the current digital landscape?
- How are community institutions and coalitions—be they community networks, digital navigators, or public-private partnerships—working to build digital equity?
The scale and scope of public investment to reach universal connectivity and digital opportunity naturally highlights gaps in knowledge and capacity. We plan to use the Opportunity Fund to nimbly support emerging research leaders and their work to help ensure we can meet this broadband moment. If you are interested in collaborating, please reach out to fellowships@benton.org