In this episode of Unbuffered, Chris is joined by Samantha Schartman, Director of Philanthropic Programs at Connect Humanity, to discuss the Alt Funding Field Guide: Building Sustainable Funding for Digital Adoption. 

The guide is a new resource that maps how digital skills and connectivity programs create value across six sectors: education, healthcare, telecom, workforce development, housing, and local government.

Samantha shares the personal history behind the guide. She helped lead the BTOP-funded Connect Your Community program, which trained 33,000 first-time computer users across five states, only to see its staff laid off when federal funding ended. 

She describes watching the field rebuild during the pandemic with ARPA and Capital Projects Fund dollars, then shrink again after the Digital Equity Act was canceled. That experience led her to form the Alt Funding Working Group, which has grown from six people to more than 150 leaders nationwide.

Together, they dig into the core idea of co-investment. Rather than relying on the next grant, programs can show local stakeholders the value they receive and ask them to invest in proportion to it. 

That could be a hospital system cutting emergency costs, an ISP gaining subscribers, or a housing provider seeing more regular rent payments. Samantha explains why this requires programs to move from testimonials to measurable outcomes, and to redesign their work around community goals.

Concluding with a case for government efficiency, Samantha shares findings from her Connecting Cuyahoga report. It found that serving social service clients offline costs roughly four times as much as serving them online, meaning digital inclusion programs can pay for themselves. 

Chris and Samantha also take aim at wasteful policies, like Medicaid-funded tablets locked to a single use, and preview future episodes that will dive deeper into each sector.

For more information about Connect Humanity's Alt Funding Field Guide, click here!

This show is 48 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed. 

You can also check out the video version via YouTube.

Transcript below.

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Listen to other episodes (formerly Community Broadband Bits) or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Thanks to Whitedrift for the song Operator, licensed Creative Commons Attribution (3.0).