Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Releases "The Digital Equity Leadership Lab: A Case Study of Community Leadership Development to Promote Digital Equity and Justice.”
Today, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation is pleased to release,"The Digital Equity Leadership Lab (DELL): A Case Study of Community Leadership Development to Promote Digital Equity and Justice.” The case study research was led by Dr. Colin Rhinesmith (he/him), a Faculty Associate and Director of the Community Informatics Lab at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and a Senior Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Rhinesmith is also an Adjunct Instructor in the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science and Co-Editor-In-Chief of The Journal of Community Informatics (see full bio below). Report design was provided by Raquel Castedo, Ph.D, a Brazilian designer, educator and researcher, based in Baltimore.
Background
In 2021, twenty-five community leaders from across Baltimore came together with national experts in areas related to network engineering, federal policymaking, community broadband networking, and grassroots organizing for a five week online program, called “The Digital Equity Leadership Lab.” DELL was created by Foundation staff as a response to other digital inclusion programs across the U.S. that have failed to consider the technical aspects of the internet and social inequalities alongside broader internet policy and advocacy goal.
Through interviews with fifteen of the twenty-five participants, plus national experts and Foundation staff, the case study sought to answer the question: How might DELL serve as a community-based leadership training model to develop the next wave of digital equity leaders?
“DELL builds upon the Foundation’s many years of community engagement to address the digital divide and promote social justice in Baltimore,” said Jane Brown, President of the Deutsch Foundation. “We are excited to offer this program to the community, and to see its impact in this important area of work.”
The case study is significant because it addresses a lack of understanding in both the scholarly literature and in practice about the role of community based leadership development to promote digital equity and justice.
“The Digital Equity Leadership Lab represents what is possible when a community foundation brings local leaders together with national experts in the digital equity field. Through my research I learned that DELL participants left the program feeling more empowered to create change with others in their communities.”
amalia deloney, Deutsch Foundation Vice President, and DELL program creator added, “The program has already brought residents together across age, race, gender, ethnicity, language, zip code and more. By bringing a very diverse set of residents together to co-learn about this powerful technology, we hope to seed new visions for digital equity and justice that are community centered, determined, and led, understanding that closing the digital divide requires community-powered problem solving.”
*Colin Rhinesmith, Ph.D-Previously, Colin was a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Science and the Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Scholarship and Research at Simmons University. He has been a Google Policy Fellow and an Adjunct Research Fellow with New America’s Open Technology Institute and a Faculty Research Fellow with the Benton Foundation. From 2016-2018, Colin was a Faculty Associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Rhinesmith received his Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services Information in Society Fellow, a Researcher with the Center for People and Infrastructures, and a Research Scholar with the Center for Digital Inclusion.