Our Mission Roars

According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of adults in households with incomes below $30,000 don’t have access to broadband – including a smartphone. This number increases precipitously as household income drops and access becomes less a question of affordability and more of getting infrastructure and facilities to serve the communities that are predominantly low income.

Empowering Communities Foundation has identified three initial locations for deployment – housing shelters for the homeless students in Broward County, Florida, East Spencer, North Carolina, and the Belmont Catchment neighborhood of Philadelphia. All three of these areas are extremely low income and virtual deserts for broadband access.

In addition to the standard problems that lack of broadband exacerbates, like population fleeing, stalled economic development and a widening digital divide, the COVID-19 crisis has brought the digital divide problem to the forefront and a motivation from community members to focus on addressing the digital divide with private, charitable solutions. If children are unable to access the internet to complete their schoolwork, they will fall even further behind and be even more disadvantaged in the classroom than they were when school was still held in a traditional manner.

The Empowering Communities Foundation is deploying private and public spectrum LTE wireless broadband solutions to low income areas that are un or underserved with broadband. While Empowering Communities Foundation will not solely rely on this private LTE wireless broadband system, it presents a mechanism to quickly provide low cost, high speed internet to household that do not currently have the infrastructure necessary to support broadband deployment.

Offering a portable broadband modem, a device (chromebook) when needed, and access to educational, financial, and governmental resources over the broadband, Empowering Communities Foundation will work to bridge this digital divide. Empowering Communities Foundation will provide this service initially for free, eventually transitioning to a small payment plan to ensure participation and commitment to continued access – ensuring affordability for all.

By deploying this rapid, semi-mobile broadband solution, Empowering Communities Foundation can ensure that households are able to access high speed internet quickly and in a manner that doesn’t presume they have the luxury of staying in the same location all of the time. The private LTE solution will also allow us to deliver wireless infrastructure quickly and with minimal contact to avoid endangering the lives of our workers or the families being served.

This quick access solution to internet connectivity along with a device will allow students under stay at home orders to access their schoolwork and not fall further behind in their studies. It will also be delivered with educational resources that will help narrow the educational gap that already exists in these communities.

In addition to the educational impact that this program is designed to serve, we also believe it will impact these households in bigger ways. Having access to telemedicine, updates on critical information and the possibility of working remotely are incidental yet serious issues this program will touch. For more information, visit hotwireempowers.org.