Kansas City's Digital Equity Journey - Episode 648 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Tom Esselman (00:07):
It was the singular individual, one-on-one moments really on the ground work. And that local impact is what has continues to drive the work that I do, and fortunately, we have a really strong collaborative community in Kansas City that supports that.

Christopher Mitchell (00:26):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell. I'm here with Tom Esselman with DEPO-KC. Welcome to the show.

Tom Esselman (00:38):
Thanks, Chris. Happy to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:40):
We are just here. We've just finished up the first day of the Community Broadband Action Network Conference in Ames, Iowa, run by John and Curtis, and it has been a wonderful time. I think

Tom Esselman (00:54):
My brain is spinning from a lot of information

Christopher Mitchell (00:57):
And we're sitting in a hotel room. That's why I didn't really go full out on the intro like I normally do, but tell us what is DEPO-FC? The KC? I get Kansas City.

Tom Esselman (01:07):
That's correct. I am from Kansas City. It's the Digital Program Office of Greater Kansas City. It was set up about a year ago on the condition that we were going to be getting a lot of federal grant funding coming into our community, and I largely got support from about four or five different foundations and some from the municipal government and even a regional government planning office. They were looking for some neutral party that could kind of help provide assistance to a broad range of nonprofits that we're counting on getting some of that funding to continue to reinforce some of their efforts in the digital inclusion space. And now with those federal grants, unlikely to materialize. It's becoming more just about nonprofit technology support and I've been in this space for quite a number of years, so I'm able to just kind of connect the dots and help make sure nonprofits who need anything from grants to low cost computers or IT support, I can kind of help them figure that out.

Christopher Mitchell (02:09):
I feel like Kansas City has weathered the kind of roller coaster of funding for digital equity work better than most. And that was one of the things when you were speaking and we were talking a little bit at our table, I wanted to ask you about, is that your perception that I feel like I feel like Kansas City has pulled together on this more than other places?

Tom Esselman (02:30):
I definitely agree with the rollercoaster analogy, but by and large, we still retain our kind of status as one of those communities that not only has a lot of coverage of broadband, but has a pretty high awareness level among all factors of the community about the importance of trying to close the digital divide. And that includes anchor institutions all the way down to the smallest of the nonprofits, but the funding in particular and just the national landscape if you will. I mean, it started with a bang back in 2012 when Google Fiber kind of picked Kansas City, Kansas, and then right after that, Kansas City, Missouri as the first cities for gigabit speed broadband. And then within a couple of years it kind of died down as Google Fiber was realizing, oh my gosh, there's not a lot of uptake from anything other than the most affluent neighborhoods.

Christopher Mitchell (03:30):
It's hard to build a network and get people to use it.

Tom Esselman (03:33):
And then Connect Home came about with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but that was in the waning years of the Obama Administration, so it was kind of cool for a year or two, and then that kind of quickly fizzled. Then there's another dull period. And then when COVID hit, I mean, my goodness, we were one of the first communities to get a lot of attention, including one of the FCC grants for, well, EB, sorry. Yeah, emergency broadband. Well now I don't even remember. I just remember A CP, right. There was,

Christopher Mitchell (04:11):
There's

Tom Esselman (04:11):
E-B-E-B-B

Christopher Mitchell (04:12):
That led to the a c.

Tom Esselman (04:13):
That's what I was thinking. EBB.

Christopher Mitchell (04:14):
Right. And then there was also some funds from the FCC for hotspots and things like that.

Tom Esselman (04:21):
So we had every reason two years ago to anticipate a big windfall from the NCIA competitive grant and even the state capacity grants. So the news not entirely unexpected in the last couple months, but the news that that's unlikely to materialize I think over the last six months has really deflated a lot of expectations. Oddly enough, the work that I'm now doing with Depot kc, it's really stepped up because there's a lot more need for just local connections and local support, and I'm just doing everything I can to help make that happen.

Christopher Mitchell (05:00):
Let's talk briefly about the background of Kansas City because I don't know, it may have been like eight or 10 years ago. I was speaking with someone, she was working in the mayor's office. We've had a lot of good mayors that have come through Kansas City. It's a city that I feel like has thought about these issues. And we were talking about, I was saying that I think in the St. Paul public schools, there's like 120 languages spoken in St. Paul or issues of poverty often are deeply related to strong immigrant communities, Hmong and East African

Tom Esselman (05:32):
Somali.

Christopher Mitchell (05:33):
Yes. And that seemed like it wasn't the case in Kansas City. It was more of a poverty of people that had long been in the United States, and that was more of the challenge. And so I think it's worth sorting that out because these are different challenges in some ways.

Tom Esselman (05:47):
Yeah. In fact, Kansas City has done a better job to expose the poverty pockets beyond just the African-American, which has really gotten the lion's share of the attention. Crime rates have been very high among that population.

Christopher Mitchell (06:04):
I don't want to minimize that in St. Paul because I feel like our neighborhoods, which were purposefully destroyed by the highways and whatnot have never recovered.

Tom Esselman (06:11):
No, I think a lot of similarities actually with St. Paul, but there are pockets of Kansas City that have an immense amount of multicultural multinational backgrounds and a lot of poverty among those populations as well. I think what you're referring to with the city goes back to under the mayor, before the current mayor, there was actually the development of and the creation of something called a digital equity strategic plan,

(06:41):
Which was a nice document in principle, but I think the interesting piece of context that you need to understand, Chris, is Kansas City was the first city to actually formalize this idea of a coalition for digital inclusion. In fact, the NDIA, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance actually was kind of formed when Angela Siefer was in Kansas City with Carrie Cogan and Crosby Kemper at the Kansas City Public Library. That was kind of the first ever national conference that became the NDIA. And so it put Kansas City in this spotlight, and yet the city of Kansas City, Missouri, the government that created this digital equity strategic plan, they weren't even really formally members of that coalition. They had a wonderful guy from the city who was on it and still there working hard. Exactly.

(07:37):
Great. And McLean Bryant Macklin, who was the Policy Director for the city, the two of them wrote that document, but there was never any real strong support from the city. I mean, neither of them was doing this work as anything other than a sidelight. It wasn't part of their jobs they were just doing, that's how passionate they were about it. So it was a great showcase for the kind of dichotomy that existed between this recognition of this city as being this first gigabit broadband city and everyone caring about it, but not a lot of the strongest players really stepping up and having a seat at the table. It's been a lot of volunteer work by a lot of great organizations. I mentioned the Kansas City Public Library, probably one of the strongest library systems to be leading digital inclusion efforts, but by and large, it's still a slow slog getting the public and private partnerships that are required to really get this thing over the goal line. And

Christopher Mitchell (08:40):
I feel like it's just getting that much harder when we thought we had multi-year funding lined up, and as you said, it's hard to imagine that funding being executed now actually becoming available

Tom Esselman (08:51):
There again, it's happening in pockets. Of course, sprint, which used to be headquartered in Kansas City and then was taken over by T-Mobile, which now has dual headquarters, one in the state of Washington and one in Kansas City, Missouri. They have now stepped back into the ring. They have a new digital equity grant program, which is nice, but it literally just came out. Applications aren't even due till the end of July of this year, and they were a little bit quiet for the last couple of years, but it was great to see them pop back up. There are other local foundations that recognizing the federal grants going away have now stepped up a big one. In particular, the Health Forward Foundation, which has done a great job, but those unfortunately seem too episodic still for kind of what we know is a persistent need. And so again, the work that I feel energized by is to try to make the awareness of those grant programs and the organizations that benefit from it a lot more pervasive so that other funders can step in and we can make this more of a sustainable thing for a long time.

Christopher Mitchell (10:04):
Do you think this is something that is going to require a long time to resolve? I mean, I go back and forth on this depending on a variety of factors, but you can imagine a situation in which we had a real strong push and we got devices out there. I'm not really sure what happens after that four years after we have a big push for devices, there's likely still deep poverty, and do we need to have another push at that point? What is the longer term of this look if we don't just look at the next two years?

Tom Esselman (10:34):
Well, what's been fascinating to me is the emergence of this role called Digital Navigator. I think the last six months have kind of pulled back on this sense that, oh, is this really going to emerge as a permanent type of job without this federal government funding? But when I think about how the future is going to be successful, I can't imagine a healthcare clinic or hospital or a school district or a library system or for that matter, any company that relies on online access to not have at least one or two full-time dedicated people whose only job

(11:18):
Is to help make sure that the clients of those organizations have somebody that can call to get help to do whatever they need to do online. We're not there yet by any stretch, but to me that just like 50 years ago, you could dial zero and get a person as the phone operator, one ringy dingy. I can't imagine going forward where organizations don't see the value of having fully dedicated positions just to ensure help with online access. So along that will come the residual need for any kind of the right devices and the support that exists to make that work.

Christopher Mitchell (12:00):
I think you're neglecting the fact that AI is going to solve everything. And the only question as to how fast we ended up in the world of Wally is how fast we can manufacture those cool scooters.

Tom Esselman (12:11):
That's humorous, but not altogether outside this realm of possibility. But yeah, and by the way, I have failed to mention probably the most consistent funding partner, for lack of a better term through all these years ironically, has been Google Fiber.

Christopher Mitchell (12:31):
And this is something that I really wanted to talk to you about because I feel like it's really weird. I mean, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has deep concerns about Google Alphabet, the parent company, their control over certain markets of their power, and yet I feel like I'm consistently one of the few people defending what is now called G-Fiber: Google Fiber Fiber because they have been a good community partner in many cases. And I'm not saying that they've solved all the problems, but they have done what one would hope to see out of a company that is focused on profit, but nonetheless has always done more than almost every large incumbent in my experience. So I wanted to spend some time and go over this and talk about what has the legacy been there, tired of people just rolling their eyes and rooting against G Fiber because it's big or it's part of an entity that is very big.

Tom Esselman (13:25):
Well, and I think there's a lot of strategic importance to the way the Google fiber now G-Fiber has been managed by the parent company to allow it to do what it does without necessarily a hundred percent being driven by how much it can drive to the bottom line. I'm a little bit biased in my experience with Google Fiber because when I first started in this space, again, 2015, Google was working with the HUD on the Connect Home, and I had my little nonprofit called Connecting for Good, and Google Fiber was putting free gigabit to the apartment in nine housing authority communities, and they weren't getting a lot of take on,

(14:10):
And there was a lot of mistrust going on among the lower income residents. And yet my nonprofit was working with those households every day providing free digital training classes and $50 desktops and a hundred dollars laptops. And it was very easy for me to see how Google Fiber thinks about itself in the overall framework of Alphabet, what we now know as Alphabet. They immediately pivoted and embraced my little nonprofit as one of three or four key partners that would work with them on every signup event, be their kind of trust quotient. That's a term that Rachel Merlo, who's the commercial engagement director and our longtime supporter, she coined that term.

Christopher Mitchell (15:02):
That term seems counterproductive

Tom Esselman (15:03):
To me, trust quotient. Well, and it's only because Google is so globally known, and so for them to, I think the idea, like you mentioned, they are good community partners because they recognize they need community partners to break down a lot of those trust barriers wherever they are in the

Christopher Mitchell (15:22):
World. And I can't say that I know what they've done in every single market, but I've seen it in San Antonio. I've seen it in Austin, I've seen it in a number of places where I've done some work.

Tom Esselman (15:32):
Yeah, no, they've been super helpful and they've done a lot of things really without recognition or without a lot of hoopla or PR about it, which, and examples would be they have a program, a product that somewhat still exists called Community Connect, where there's nonprofits who are in a prime position and they could just benefit from literally a free fiber drop that could then through ethernet cables. I laughed because earlier today you were talking about teaching middle schoolers the benefit of crimping ethernet cable. Well, I got to work on a 33 unit apartment building that was funded by the Missouri Department of Housing, and Google Fiber provided a free drop to that property, but I had to terminate the cables into each of the 33 apartments and put access points. And it was so cool though because they did that without any fanfare, and it was just another one of the ways that they like to step up and make sure that we as community nonprofits doing this work, we know we've got a trusted partner in Google Fiber. And so I've seen that now as their footprint has expanded outside of Kansas City, in fact, we're here in Ames, which is part of the region that's controlled by this director in the Kansas City area.

Christopher Mitchell (16:58):
Now, if we go back the community Connect that brought Google Fiber to those public housing units, that was actually, I think one of the later things in some ways, the first thing was their business model was to charge people, I think $70 a month for a gigabit, but to make a really low cost offer. And they're also, I think they did not see much uptake in the low income neighborhoods, right?

Tom Esselman (17:23):
Yeah. They went out with a $15 program, but it very quickly turned out to be not realistic given the way, particularly in the last few years since COVID, the speed minimum standards have increased, but I think now they still have a low price product. I think their lowest offering now is 25 or $30, and I want to believe that that's a hundred symmetrical, if not higher, and it's a very easy tool on their website. You just plug into your address and they let you know whether they can do it or not. But they've also been very willing to help healthcare clinics and low income housing communities and community centers, and there's multiple points of access to the product they bring. But I think Chris, the most telling thing, if you want to bring it back to what's its overall impact in Kansas City, I mean it wasn't even five or six years from the launch of back in 2012, the whole entire metro area was crawling with fiber.

(18:32):
I mean spectrum mainly, and a little bit of at t getting in the market. And then of course we have T-Mobile on the wireless side, but that used to be Sprint. Comcast is in the outer line areas surrounding Kansas City, but I don't think there's hardly any area of the Kansas City metro area now that doesn't have fiber infrastructure. And that's all because of Google Fiber making that first step and doing all these other, I think really strong partnering things to just let everyone know that, Hey, fiber is it, and they can do a lot of other things in a lot of other markets, but I think they made a huge impact and continue to do so in the Kansas City area.

Christopher Mitchell (19:16):
So let's talk more about their role then with the nonprofits. So with you and others, what have you seen in terms of what they've done? What's the legacy of now more than 10 years of Google Fiber in the market?

Tom Esselman (19:31):
You look for, oh, is it going to be waning? Is it going to be just periodic? I mean, it wasn't even three months ago, one of the more decrepit city community centers in an area that is now starting to get attention because it's half a mile away from the new Women's professional soccer stadium.

(19:51):
They got an upgrade through city funding and they got three Google Fiber and they got extra funding for devices, and now it's a beautiful learning center and community center thanks to Google Fiber. And they didn't even do it as a solo thing. They went into it with another great local nonprofit called Literacy KC, which provides a lot of the training and another nonprofit called Urban Tech, which really works on helping people get certifications and more job ready type of skills. So I think the fact that Google Fiber started in Kansas City has maintained a presence and is still doing these kind of nonprofit outreach things. And incidentally, the individual, I refer to Rachel Merlo, she has been there from day one. She's born and raised in Kansas City. I mean, I think everything they've done that market speaks to the fact that this is not just a passing commitment they made. It continues to feel like it's going to be there for many years to come.

Christopher Mitchell (20:59):
I hope so. I mean, I do wonder if Google Fiber is sold how rapidly that could change. Unfortunately, I mean, and I don't say that to say that this is on the immediate horizon, but there is a reason that we're speaking so positively about it. I will say there's a reason that I always have reservations about this because those things can change.

Tom Esselman (21:19):
That's natural. And we know just from the recent election how quickly things can change indeed, whether it's business or politics. But I would just want to reiterate that as a corporation that understands its role as part of a profit generating enterprise, they've gone out of their way to set an example of being a good corporate citizen for the community. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Christopher Mitchell (21:54):
So let's talk a little bit then about what you've actually seen on the ground working with people. And what's interesting to me is we often talk about digital equity as an Internet connection, getting people on to do telehealth and that sort of a thing. You are on a panel as a wonderful panel talking about devices, getting devices out there and training out there. And one of your more impactful stories, I would say, didn't even involve the Internet, really, it involves mobile texting.

Tom Esselman (22:22):
Well, I appreciate you bringing it up, Chris, and I need to make sure your audience knows that even though I've heard the podcast and I've seen you on multiple Zoom meetings, and this idea of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is just right there. I never used the term local self-reliance in describing my experience in this space, but it perfectly captures it. I think I told you earlier, I spent most of my career in Kansas City working for Hallmark, and it's a big corporation, but it really encourages all its employees to get out in the community and do volunteer work and things like that. So when I left Hallmark and started doing work in this space,

Christopher Mitchell (23:04):
Before you go there, I just want to note, you noted one of your roles at Hallmark. Did you expect the groans?

Tom Esselman (23:10):
It's quite common.

Christopher Mitchell (23:11):
It is quite common

Tom Esselman (23:13):
What Chris is referring to. At one point in my career, my title was Innovation Director for Greeting Cards, and right shortly after iTunes came out back in 2004, got the inspiration that because of the emotional power of popular songs, if we could just figure out a way to get 15 or 20 seconds of really moving songs into a greeting card, that would be a good way to move the needle. And of course, it kind of doubled the average of greeting cards, so that's why people groan. But more importantly, it introduced annoying. Well, so say the parents annoying little characters like Oops, and Yo-Yo and lots of little hamster noises and things that kids loved playing with all the time.

Christopher Mitchell (24:00):
I will never forget the joy on my son's face. The first time, I think it was from his grandparents, he got a card that played noise when he opened it, and oh, he was so happy.

Tom Esselman (24:11):
Well, the reality is, as I mentioned, the emotional power of a few bars of a favorite song, what a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong or I Will Survive by Gloria Gainor, these kinds of things, in fact, bad To the Bone by George Thurgood was probably one of the hottest selling birthday cards we ever had. And the reaction we got from families who had older adult members who had dementia for instance, and memories were reignited just within the first few seconds of holding a card, opening up and then hearing this music. So I was really struck by the potential that Hallmark even had in combining technology with the way to improve people's lives. So ultimately, when I left Hallmark, I got into nonprofit work, and that's kind of how I am doing what I'm doing. But the things that have always struck me are those kind of local one-on-one interactions with people.

(25:11):
And I was telling a story earlier today about a gentlemen that really was angry and came into one of our computer labs and we're right in the urban core on the east side of the city, and we had this open, welcoming computer lab environment. And he was upset because he had a cell phone and he had a daughter that lived in Atlanta who had a baby girl, and it was this gentleman's only grandchild, but he had never been able to meet the grandchild and was able to see pictures that his daughter sent him on the phone, but his daughter was mad at him. He couldn't respond, he didn't know how to text, and it bothered him that she was getting so mad at him for something that he just couldn't figure out how to do. And also, she wanted him to learn how to take a picture.

(26:03):
She wanted to show her daughter a picture of her grandfather. And long story short, we asked him if we could see his phone, and he had about a hundred photos on his phone, but 99 of them were just on the floor or the ceiling, but apparently one of his neighbors had taken one picture of him sitting on his couch with his dog. So we found that we got his daughter's phone number. We texted it to her, and within a few seconds he got a text back from his daughter that just said, Aw daddy. And the man just started bawling his eyes out. And so we're just sitting there and knowing the impact that this can have. I mean, we translated it. I think I was telling you a little while ago, we also had a gentleman who was recovering from a stroke, and one of our computer trainers who's still there by the way, and she's 87 years old, Carol Meyers, an amazing story that we'll have to talk about some other time. But this is about seven, eight years ago. She's sat him down and got him playing solitaire on the desktop, and it started improving his hand eye coordination to the point where he would come every day just to play Solitaire online. And it helped him literally recover from his stroke. And those things drove me in the work that I did with Connecting for Good, and we got more and more popular. I ultimately merged with PCs for People, actually was gifted by another nonprofit, a warehouse, and I needed a partner to help me run a warehouse.

(27:36):
So I got with PCs for people about five years ago. But all of our experiences, even when we started increasing our computer distribution and other things, it was these singular individual one-on-one moments or even doing computer distribution events at a local school or a church or community center where it's really on the ground work. And that local impact is what continues to drive the work that I do. And fortunately, we have a really strong collaborative community in Kansas City that supports that.

Christopher Mitchell (28:11):
I'm just struck because you and I are both of ages where we remember the four times, right, and I'm even mean before 2011, right? I mean before 1996, right?

Tom Esselman (28:22):
Yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (28:22):
We were talking about Windows 95 and just how much things I feel like people take it for granted, and it is truly amazing. There's a saying that we see the productivity revolution everywhere around us, except for in the statistics, this is maybe a Bill Gates or something like that, or someone studying and said that. And I'll say that it doesn't surprise me too much because we have not spread the benefits. There are some of us that know how to do a tremendous amount of things. I just turned to Rye recently, and there was an elected official who, I forget exactly where we were talking about, I think it was on a recent podcast. Oh, it was Evan Feinman, and he talked about Control Effing a document, and I turned to Rye, and we were listening to the show and the car ride down here, and I said, I think a majority of people don't know what that means, but this is a significant part of my life is I've done a website or in many programs now Control F, you can do a search of the text in front of you, and that helps me.

(29:23):
But most of the people probably don't even know that.

Tom Esselman (29:25):
In fact, I tried to say that once and someone thought I meant something different just because of the way it came. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think it's a good point because, and I'm not going to say it's of the same level of persistence as poverty and crime and things like that, but my goodness, it's one step forward, two steps back a lot

(29:58):
In the communities that we work with. I particularly see it with older adult communities because you always have people going out and people coming in, and it just depends on what their family environment was, what their neighborhoods surrounding them. But I just think we have so many challenges. And what's most interesting to me is the disconnect between services, even policies that dictate services like social security or childcare benefits or whatever relative to the level of digital literacy skills and access of the people that it's intended to help. And so we just continue to see the need for ongoing resource support and more and more hopefully younger people that have the heart that it takes to do this kind of work. I know we were talking earlier this idea of having digital navigators, and we got to hear from one earlier today, and you don't have to be a technology wiz, you just have to be a very patient, empathetic person.

Christopher Mitchell (31:16):
You don't even have to be extroverted.

Tom Esselman (31:18):
And that's so true. And the reason I like telling stories like the ones you just heard me share is because hopefully that will draw more people in, and now we're hearing about the possible demise of AmeriCorps vistas, and that's where we've been fortunate to get a lot of incoming younger talent in this space, but we just got to keep finding ways to socialize the impact of this work and how much it relies on good hearted people, but they got to be ones that are driven by these outcomes that really do show that we're making the world a better place.

Christopher Mitchell (31:59):
A lot of your examples have focused on more of the aging adults, and one of the things that came up recently on a podcast with Sasha Minera was that there's been, I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but we have not done a good job of documenting the economic benefits of bringing more people online now, bringing on a 70-year-old person who has retired, frankly, there are still benefits, I have no doubt. But it's not really going to be the same benefit as making sure that someone who's in the prime of their working years is better able to. So I'm curious as we finish up, what are some of the things that you would look for in terms of making the case that this is not just a charity feel good kind of thing, but is a economically motivated rational policy?

Tom Esselman (32:51):
Well, I'm going to give you one example close to home to kind of highlight where I think the opportunities are. So my wife is also a nonprofit leader in Kansas City, and she runs an early learning center called Operation Breakthrough. It's gotten quite a bit of publicity the last couple of years because the Kansas City Chiefs has a player named Travis Kelce, and

(33:14):
It's been one of his most dedicated community service organizations that he's worked with. And about three years ago, they started a program there that's focused on kids that have gone beyond the eighth grade called the Ignition Lab. And in fact, my group Connecting for Good provided computer equipment and even some IT support for them to start a computer repair and tech lab, and it consistently draws six to eight to 10 high school kids every quarter and they get high school credit for it. And now they're starting to repair all of the staff computers that Operation Breakthrough. And they have over 200 staff members, teachers and social workers. And what really made me aware of the kind of often overlooked benefit, there were two boys in particular that started out there for the first year and they were sophomores. And by the time they reached, this was last year, seniors in high school, they both got jobs at Honeywell entry level jobs, but they paid $22 an hour.

(34:26):
They were the first kids in their family to not have to worry about whether they were going to go to college or not. None of them had, and a lot of these kids are not facing a prospect of ever going to college. But the skills that are being taught and learned, and I think where the opportunities going forward, we're going to see more and more of is just basic level IT support and computer hardware. I mean the amount of viable job skills that you can learn. And I know you're going to be spending some time with some middle school kids, again, CRI criming and ethernet tables, but just the hands-on nature of it. And that's what struck me in the first few weeks of this program. They don't even use any academic terms. I remember we would just bring them shells of desktop towers and have them just take 'em apart and watch very closely and then put 'em back together,

(35:28):
And then we would start telling 'em what the parts are called and what they do. And within six or eight weeks, they were asking to learn more. And so I think if we can capture those kinds of things, not to mention coating and all the other things that we're seeing that are more advanced, I really do believe that that aspect of the kind of job pipeline is going to be like the, I dunno, low hanging fruit for us to show that we can actually make an impact by focusing on what digital inclusion can bring to our stabilizing our economy and giving the individuals in the households some sense of hope for the future.

Christopher Mitchell (36:11):
I love the way you laid that out because that is how my brain works too. I think a lot of people, and there's people that know a lot about how we actually learn things. I'm not one of them, but I think about I cannot read a travel book about a place I'm going to. I can only read a travel book about a place I have been because I just don't have a frame of reference. And so the fact that you're first taking the computer apart and getting familiar and then later you're getting a sense that I just feel like a lot of people are like, no, first you're going to sit down and you're going to learn what the names of all these things are. And I'm just sort of like, who cares about the names? The names are just something arbitrary we've assigned. The interesting part is not that and

Tom Esselman (36:49):
Plus kids to take stuff apart. So the challenge of taking, yeah, you can take it apart, but you just have the key is you got to put it back together and it's got to still work. And so you play games with it. And I'll be honest with you, I learned that from my wife who's an educator, and there's just scores of organizations around Kansas City that are doing, like I mentioned, the coding work and the more advanced certification type work. There's a great organization called Per Scholas that started in Brooklyn, I think they pronounce it. And they do a lot of tech training for not just kids, but adults as well. And they're developing a bigger and better track record of placing people into jobs. And I think that type of thing we got to continue to focus on and give a lot more visibility to and more support to.

Christopher Mitchell (37:42):
Yeah. Well, it's been wonderful talking with you, Tom. Thank you for taking the time today.

Tom Esselman (37:46):
Well, thanks Chris. It's been fun for me. I've been learning about all kinds of things that I never thought I was going to even care about when I started this eight or 10 years ago. I mean, we were talking about the Universal Service Fund and its impact on E-Rate and rural broadband. And here we are in Ames, Iowa with a lot of broadband providers that care a lot about rural broadband, and yet they're just as interested in hearing the stories that we've been sharing about what happens in the urban landscape and how things as simple as devices and digital literacy training, they impact things like take rates and what makes a broadband network successful. So for me, it's been a great experience and the chance to sit here and chat with you, it's just kind of like icing on the cake. Right?

Christopher Mitchell (38:35):
I like to hear that.

Tom Esselman (38:37):
Thanks again.

Ry Marcattilio (38:38):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available @communitynets.org/broadbandbits. Email us at podcast@communitynets.org with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on BlueSky. His handle is @SportShotChris. Follow communitynets.org stories on BlueSky, the handles @CommunityNets. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons.