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Rural Prosperity

Apr 13 2021

Broadband Funding is Coming. Now What?

This guest post comes from Maggie Drummond-Bahl, the Senior Program Officer at Maine Community Foundation, working with donors and other partners to improve the quality of life for all Maine people.

More funding is (finally!) coming to support better broadband connectivity.  What can we do to ensure that rural and remote communities can maximize this much-needed investment? What role should funders play?

For rural states and communities – and the people and businesses that live and work in them – federal funding through the Economic Recovery Act to expand high-speed internet is welcome news. That news is sweet indeed after a grueling and heartbreaking year of COVID-19 when our ability to connect virtually was more important than ever. 

Before we can jump at this opportunity, though, we have work to do. And we need to do it quickly. Here are some thoughts about how we can approach this unprecedented opportunity to become better connected than ever before.

Work to build community capacity

Successful broadband expansion often starts with a few committed champions, much like entrepreneurial ecosystem building often begins with a few key connectors. Champions can identify and recruit others to create broadband committees or working groups and help launch a conversation. 

Two women sit with their backs to the camera at a community event.

Bolstering these local and regional planning efforts can help educate community members about what they need and what goals they share as a community.

Local efforts can, with limited resources:

  • Conduct community surveys, 
  • Host meetings, 
  • Engage with local organizations, institutions and businesses, 
  • Develop maps, 
  • Talk to providers, 
  • Evaluate options, and 
  • Eventually make progress toward implementing infrastructure.

All of these steps are essential, so the community knows what it needs and wants – and more importantly why – long before large-scale funding is available.  

Leave no person behind

Successfully building even a fiber-to-the-premise network isn’t enough. We must consider who can afford the service and how to ensure that people can access devices to connect.  

Children work on a science project in their classroom. Ensuring equitable broadband access for all children is imperative.

The digital divide is about more than the lack of broadband infrastructure itself — it’s about ensuring equitable access to high-speed internet for everyone in our communities.

Broadband committees, working groups, and community outreach should meaningfully include a broad range of people: students, low-income families with children, older people, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, entrepreneurs working from their homes, and critical institutions in our communities.

We should constantly ask ourselves: 

  • Who is not at the table? 
  • Who is not being served and why?  

This pandemic has made painfully clear the inequity in our systems, especially the ability to connect to affordable, reliable, high-speed internet. When we’re all involved in the conversation, we all benefit.

Forge meaningful partnerships

In Maine, a place that prides itself on a certain hearty independence, building trust across institutions, between communities and government, between neighboring towns, and even between customers and providers, has been critical as we move forward.  

A group of four colleagues stand together, with two people shaking hands.

A great example is the growth of the broad and diverse stakeholder coalition, the Maine Broadband Coalition. The coalition was founded as an ad-hoc group with scarce resources several years ago to elevate the voices of broadband users in policy and other conversations. 

The Coalition now regularly communicates and shares information with over 2200 people — up from just 220 when we made our first grant to the group in early 2019. 

The Coalition is also the home of several unifying initiatives including a successful bond campaign in 2020, a new statewide speed test campaign, and an annual conference where communities and partners share their learning and connect with one another.

We’ve also seen great partnerships emerge between social service agencies serving vulnerable populations and digital literacy experts placing hotspot tablets into the hands of people who need them — along with 24-7 technical assistance.

Coordination between funders is another highlight, where our own grantmaking has been informed and bolstered by our state partner, the Connect Maine Authority, and other private foundations and donors. 

This has allowed flexible early-stage capital to move planning efforts, community engagement, and digital inclusion. These are just a few examples, but partnership is the secret sauce for all. 

Be flexible and entrepreneurial

It has become abundantly clear that the solution for one community is not likely to be the solution for another. We should all strive to be nimble and support varied approaches to increase connectivity.  

An illustration of a computer with the words "stay connected" is painted in yellow on a turquoise blue wooden background.

Here are a few examples of what this looks like in communities around the state:

  • A municipal broadband utility was the right approach for several communities in remote Downeast Maine — and they were the first in the state to try it. 
  • Other communities are pursuing dark-fiber, open-access networks. 
  • Some needed to add WiFi networks on Main Street or upgrade routers at the library for public access. 
  • Still others are opting for an upgrade with an incumbent provider.  
  • And some communities are experimenting with affordability funds to support households that struggle to afford monthly service costs.  

One of our strong nonprofit partners in Maine (Island Institute) has developed a playbook for communities that emphasizes an effective community process without predetermining the outcome.  

All options should be on the table and partners should constantly adjust to support community needs and priorities.

Funders: now’s the time to stay at the table

As a community foundation with a small percentage of discretionary funding available, we initially did not think we could meaningfully support the work of expanding broadband. If we didn’t have the scale of funding to invest in infrastructure and it is really the role of government anyway, we wondered: what could we contribute?  

Other small and mid-size funders might feel the same, especially now that we know significant federal funding is coming for broadband investment. But now is the most important time for philanthropy to stay engaged. 

That Maine Broadband Coalition started as an informal, ad hoc network. Targeted investments in organizational capacity have turned a passionate and loosely affiliated group of stakeholders who care about the benefits of broadband into an active and growing coalition. 

The end result is a group that elevates the voices of all who depend on good internet in statewide policy discussions, supports communities through a train-the-trainer model, and acts as a convener to deepen our collective understanding of the connections between broadband and the community, economic, and climate resilience work we all care about. 

We can use whatever level of capacity we have to support community planning efforts, build the strength of organizations and coalitions doing the work, get ready for emerging opportunities, and raise our voices to advocate for better connectivity.  

Now is the time to stay at the table, and pull up a few extra chairs for others to jump in.

On April 15, please join us at the first RuralRISE Technology Summit, a virtual event that will include expert panels, real-world success cases, and networking — all focused on the critical development of broadband and the people and organizations driving the effort. 

Register for the Summit (April 15, 2-5 p.m. EST), and make sure to tune in for our fireside chat about the creative partnerships that are helping to close the digital divide in Maine!

Written by Guest Author · Categorized: Rural Matters · Tagged: Rural Entrepreneurship, Rural Infrastructure, Rural Prosperity, Rural Tech, RuralRISE Summit

Mar 30 2021

3 Crucial Areas of Focus for Rural Small Business

This guest post comes from David Ponraj, founder and CEO of Startup Space (startupspace.us), a social enterprise working with economic and community development organizations across the country to create digital connections to entrepreneurship resources while also providing data and systems for resource management.   

Why focus on small businesses? Is the impact worth the effort? What’s in it for economic development organizations? 

According to Brooking Institute, “rural small businesses have been found to generate wealth that stays in the community, build local leadership, and even contribute to population health” (read more). 

Investing in rural small businesses is good for the entire community, state, and nation. 

However, rural small businesses lack the tools and resources needed to build and grow. And the pandemic has not made it easy on our rural communities. 61% of rural small businesses felt unsupported by federal government policies, according to the “Principal Financial Well-Being Index” survey of business owners. 

If we want to bring back rural America, we need to focus on supporting rural small businesses. Some of the key areas of focus:

  1. Access to Capital
  2. Access to Broadband Internet
  3. Access to entrepreneurship resources

Let’s take a closer look at each of those three areas of focus.

Access to Capital

Small businesses everywhere struggle to find capital that can fit their needs in terms of speed, cost, and total amount of capital. 

A marble building facade reads The Union Banking & Trust Co.

Red tape, high interest rates, and lack of microloans force small businesses to turn to loan sharks and online lenders who engage in predatory lending. 

According to the Federal Reserve, 40% of rural counties lost community bank branches between 2012 and 2017. This sets the small businesses back even before they start. If entrepreneurship is about wealth creation, then access to right-sized capital is essential to creating value for the small business owner and enabling them to earn a living. 

Access to Broadband Internet

An example of support, one Southern Virginia town is leveraging creative partnerships united by its fiber network to boost the creation and development of its small businesses. 

In partnership with Microsoft TechSpark Virginia and with state support, Mid-Atlantic Broadband founded the SOVA Innovation Hub in 2020. This 15,000 square-foot nonprofit center for innovation and entrepreneurship features coworking and meeting space, entrepreneurship and digital skills training, and access to technology experts and experiences. 

Three women in masks are seen sitting inside the newly opened SOVA Innovation Hub space.

The partnership envisions the community hub will spark economic transformation in the small Virginia town of 8,142 that was once reliant on tobacco. The hub is the first new building to open in downtown South Boston, VA, in 40 years. 

The strategy for the South Boston ecosystem outlines six key goals:

  1. Connect entrepreneurship resources
  2. Support existing business growth and innovation
  3. Develop entrepreneurship training programs to nurture aspiring entrepreneurs
  4. Expedite access to capital
  5. Expedite broadband expansion
  6. Fund and facilitate implementation to ensure flexibility and sustainability

In addition to training programs, grant funds are being used to create a virtual hub with digital infrastructure through Startup Space. SOVA’s digital hub on the Startup Space platform enhances access to the nonprofit’s programs and resources, including a “resource compass” to help entrepreneurs navigate all of the resources available through regional support organizations. 

The digital hub makes entrepreneurship and business support services and resources available on-demand through the SOVA website or through an application that can be downloaded on any mobile device. 

It is the community’s “one-stop shop” for entrepreneurship and helps SOVA behind the scenes to organize the local ecosystem.  

To drive long-term development of the rural entrepreneurship ecosystem, the GO Virginia state board awarded the nonprofit partnership a major grant to support entrepreneurship training, youth entrepreneurship, and increasing access to capital. 

Access to broadband is fueling this innovation; creative partnerships are helping to realize its full potential to achieve economic growth. It’s a compelling point of reference for rural economies to develop strong entrepreneurial ecosystems (more on local strategies from Main Street America and the Brookings Institution). 

Access to Entrepreneurship Resources

Small businesses everywhere need access to the resource community to start and grow their businesses. We launched Startup Space in 2018 with the singular focus of better connecting small businesses to resources in the community. 

A graphic courtesy of Startup Space shows a man with white hair standing in a garage, with text reading "Unlock Opportunities. Create equitable access."

In rural communities, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that resources are often distant and the density of business services (for example, lawyers, accountants, and web developers) is sparse or located hundreds of miles over in an urban community. 

This creates a unique challenge for rural entrepreneurs who need the same support network as their urban counterparts to build a thriving business. 

We countered this by mapping the local ecosystem and broadening the radius to help rural small businesses easily find the resources they need. We also focus on giving select resources within the community a clear designation so the intended underserved entrepreneur can easily find dedicated resources and support. 

Technical assistance can also be hard to come by for rural entrepreneurs. By providing a virtual platform, we can bridge the divide and bring some of these resources right into the home of the small business owner. 

When technical assistance is combined with access to capital, small business success rates go up dramatically. 

Investing in What Rural Businesses Need

So what’s next for rural America? And what can your organization do to help support local businesses in these three key areas?

We are doing our rural small businesses and our nation a disservice by not recognizing the unique challenges and opportunities that exist in rural America and allocating appropriate resources to quickly address these challenges. 

Rural small businesses are the backbone of our rural economy and if we want a strong and vibrant economy, we need to invest in building out the infrastructure that rural communities need. (Read more about why rural America isn’t fully connected yet.)

This April, join us at the first RuralRISE Technology Summit, a virtual event including expert panels, real-world success cases, and networking — all focused on the critical development of broadband and its utilization in rural economic ecosystem strategies. 

Register for the Summit (April 15, 2-5 p.m. EST), followed by a social hour hosted by our team at Startup Space. 

About Startup Space
Startup Space is a leading community platform that helps connect entrepreneurs to resources in their communities while also providing data analytics and management systems for community builders. For more information, visit https://www.startupspace.us or contact us at media@startupspace.app. The podcast, “Breaking Down Barriers,” featuring entrepreneurial ecosystem builders, is available at: https://startupspace.captivate.fm

Written by Guest Author · Categorized: Rural Matters · Tagged: Rural Entrepreneurship, Rural Infrastructure, Rural Prosperity, Rural Tech, RuralRISE Summit

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