Patricia Steward, Manager of Digital Inclusion for the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), came to the Digital Inclusion Leadership Certificate with a focus on ensuring that CHA’s public housing residents can benefit from the Internet.
Steward tells us about her plans for digital equity and how the certificate program is helping her deliver.
What is the most important problem that you are trying to solve right now regarding digital equity?
The Chicago Housing Authority wants to ensure that our residents have access to affordable internet that they can use. With the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) winding down, this is more important than ever.
We think about this as a three-legged stool which I learned from ConnectHomeUSA. Residents must have affordable Internet access, computers and devices that meet their needs, and digital literacy training so that they understand how to use connected services to improve their lives. We work with a number of partners to make this happen, including Compudopt and PC’s for People on the equipment side that provided nearly 900 computers to families last year. We also partner with organizations like AARP, which provided a grant to support digital literacy for seniors.
The certificate program has been really helpful in moving the affordable access piece forward.
How has the Digital Inclusion Leadership Certificate helped you achieve your objectives?
I had no background in infrastructure and this part of the course was extremely helpful for me. It changed my mindset.
There are various departments who work in technology infrastructure and I am now bringing these departments together to discuss infrastructure as a whole and how we keep families on affordable Internet with the ACP phasing out. We are making sure that this conversation happens in one place where we can all work together on this problem, rather than over and over in separate groups who create separate plans.
How has the expertise you gained in the program helped you support Chicago overall?
I helped the city of Chicago write their Digital Equity Plan. Based on what I learned about mapping in the certificate program, I realized that the Chicago Housing Authority has some of the best data about who is not connected to the Internet, helping me to recognize how inaccurate the connectivity maps were for our city. We are using this information to challenge the funding allocation maps.
