Thanks for your interest in helping out with the WNY Digital Equity Coalition’s work! Here are a few things you can do to give us a hand:
Advocate
Since we’re an advocacy organization, it would be a big help if you could take a few minutes to inform your legislators about the importance of digital inclusion and digital equity. We’ll add form letters about critical issues that you’ll be able to fill out and send to your elected officials.
- Send an email to your U.S. Congressional Representative using ResistBot asking them to support H.R. 6929, which would allocate $7 billion to fund the Affordable Connectivity Plan, which has provided subsidies to millions of low-income households to make high-speed broadband more affordable. Current ACP funding is set to expire in April 2024 or as soon as funds are exhausted. This bill is currently the best hope of seeing ACP continue to provide access to millions!
- This is the US Senate bill that’s a counterpart to HR 6929 above. Send an email to your U.S. Senator using ResistBot asking them to support S. 3565, which would allocate $7 billion to fund the Affordable Connectivity Plan, which has provided subsidies to millions of low-income households to make high-speed broadband more affordable. Current ACP funding is set to expire in April 2024 or as soon as funds are exhausted. This bill is currently the best hope of seeing ACP continue to provide access to millions!
- Send an email to Governor Hochul using ResistBot asking New York State to: 1) release $25 million in digital inclusion dollars that have already been secured, 2) commit to allocating $5 million in the fiscal year 2024-2025 budget to support digital inclusion programming, and 3) commit to allocating a minimum of 25% of all broadband expansion dollars for digital inclusion programming.
- Send an email to your New York State legislators and Governor Hochul using ResistBot asking them to ensure that state and federal broadband and digital inclusion funds be allocated through a community-driven participatory budgeting process. (You’ll see the full text on ResistBot.) The Coalition sent a slightly longer version to these elected officials in July, 2021 ( Word | PDF )
Join
What does joining the Coalition look like? Here are some examples:
- Follow our Twitter account and like/share our content across all social platforms with the #wnydigitalequity hashtag (estimated time commitment: <1 minute).
- Become a Coalition member and attend monthly meetings via Zoom (estimated time commitment: 1 hour/month).
- Become a member, attend monthly Coalition meetings via Zoom, and join a committee (estimated time commitment: 2-3 hours/month plus possibly time spent on committee projects).
If you’d like to learn more, please drop us an email at info@wnydigitalequity.org or fill out the form on the Contact Us page.
Inform
There’s a lot of stuff happening in Western New York relating to digital equity! What we know about, we list in our directory — please share these resources with your community if you see something new to you.
We also know that there’s a lot happening that’s off our radar. Please consider adding to our directory by filling out this form.
Donate
Right now, we’re pretty much volunteers and grant-funded. If you’d like to help fund our work, you can make a donation to the Western New York COVID-19 Community Response Fund, care of the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. Please be sure to indicate that your donation is intended to support the WNY Digital Equity Coalition’s work (choose “Other” under “Donation Designation” and write in that your donation is for the WNY Digital Equity Coalition). We use these funds to support projects conducted by our Coalition and its members.