Olivia from Govlaunch begins a two-part series with Detroit to discuss the city's first ever Director of Digital Inclusion, Joshua Edmonds. We'll learn about how Detroit became one of the first US cities to create this position and how they're tackling this critical issue.
In part 1, we talk with Joshua Edmonds to learn about Connect 313 - Detroit's citywide, data-driven digital inclusion strategy. Joshua shares lessons learned and winning strategies for bringing various stakeholders together to improve connectivity and access to devices for Detroiters.
Directly reporting to the CIO at the City of Detroit, the Director for Digital inclusion is responsible for developing and implementing a citywide, sustainable digital inclusion strategy on behalf of the 100,000+ residents lacking fixed-broadband access. This position is a unique partnership between the University of Michigan and the City of Detroit with support from the Knight Foundation.
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Featured government: Detroit, MI
Episode guests: Joshua Edmonds, Detroit's Director for Digital inclusion
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, Olivia from our team begins a two part series with Detroit to discuss the city's first ever director of digital inclusion. We'll learn about how Detroit became one of the first US cities to create this position and how they're tackling this critical issue. I'll turn now to Olivia to dive into this important initiative with director of digital inclusion, Joshua Edmonds.
Olivia: (00:47)
Hi, I'm Olivia from Govlaunch, and I'm here with Joshua Edmonds from the city of Detroit in the US. Joshua, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Joshua: (00:56)
So Joshua Edmonds, the director of digital inclusion at the city of Detroit. We are the first, uh, municipal government, to house the position. And, uh, Detroit itself is a city of roughly 700,000 and of that 700,000, 25% of Detroit residents do not have internet access of any kind and roughly 46% don't have access to high-speed internet. So big shoes to fill. Uh, the mayor has made this a very big priority specifically looking at how do we extend opportunity to more residents, and we know that opportunity lives online. And so we have a real unique opportunity ourselves to be able to showcase a model that can be replicated and scaled across other municipalities that are facing their own digital divide, which is part of a larger digital divide. As it relates to residents who are living in poverty, uh, or adjacent to poverty, we don't have access to that high-speed internet don't have the wherewithal or the ability to procure a computer that they're comfortable with, or the ability to be able to use that computer for whatever, whether that be improved learning, employability or wellbeing.
Olivia: (02:05)
So obviously there is a lot happening to keep you busy. Can you tell us a bit more on how things are going just generally in Detroit information and innovation space today?
Joshua: (02:16)
So we're at a really interesting point and I would say that it's an inflection point. So, uh, I am not saying that my role was the catalyst for every, um, innovative, uh, measure that's that's happening in Detroit and that will happen, but what I will say, and since I came into Detroit in this role, which was January of 2019, uh, there has been a very concentrated effort to build an ecosystem that can support whatever we would like to see in Detroit. And so, um, Apple, for example, has made a very unique investment in, uh, in Detroit this fall, they're going to be unveiling the Apple developer academy. That is the only developer academy in the United States. And they are putting that in Detroit, Michigan. And I'm not saying that all of our work in Detroit has led to that. But what I am saying is there's a real unique way for us to be able to empower ecosystems at scale.
Joshua: (03:14)
And so our initial focus was really how do we advocate for public interest technology in a way that can afford more residents opportunity? So my first year in 2019 was all on advocacy and awareness. And how do we build this ecosystem approach 2020, obviously the pandemic hit, but all of those conversations in 2019, all those bridges that were built well, then they got stress tested in 2020. And that's where we implemented a lot, what we said we were going to do in 2019. And so now we're in 2021. Now we're fine tuning. Now we see momentum in Washington. And I think that in Detroit, but we're doing our best to do is say, Hey, we have an ecosystem. We have our corporations, we have our residents, we have our community groups. We're all working together. We're moving forward together. So our innovation ecosystem looks very similar to maybe some of your larger efforts you're seeing with larger public private partnerships that are really rooted in community growth, but not necessarily something that we had to compromise the integrity of our community to be able to reap rewards and benefits.
Olivia: (04:15)
I really appreciate how community centric your approach is. And that's the great news about the academy. I'm really stoked for Detroit. That's huge. It is no surprise that your city has been attracting a lot of attention because some of the initiatives you just mentioned, and of course, because of the creation of your current role. Tell us a bit more about the origin of your position and how Detroit became the first us city to have its very own director of digital inclusion.
Joshua: (04:41)
So the origin of the role really came from the Knight foundation's leadership. So the knight's Detroit office at the time was staffed by a brilliant woman by the name of Katie Locker who went to bat for this role. She said, what if someone in municipal government were to go to bed and wake up every single day and the only thing they thought about was the digital divide. And what if that person wasn't just a random coordinator or someone buried deep within the bureaucratic structure of government? What if they were front facing? And they just knew everything about the ecosystem. What if we had that? And so Katie alongside our chief information officer Beth Niblock, I actually met in convened and said, all right, we're committed to doing this. And so if you're looking at the recipe already, when we're going to be breaking this out one, philanthropy can be really used to jumpstart this model in a great way.
Joshua: (05:36)
And two, if you have a strong chief information officer, a CIO, those are the people who really can go to bat in a unique way. And so those two were the real catalysts for this role being created. And then obviously the university of Michigan who also played a role in this, they housed me to some extent. So they housed the dollars, the city to not receive the dollars. So for the first two years of me being in Detroit, my time was really spent on university of Michigan's payroll. However, I was public facing city of Detroit. And so when most people saw my role, they thought I've just been at the city of Detroit the entire time, which is for the most part true. I spent 98% of my time within city hall. So really this came from philanthropy at the intersection of academia, really supporting this role. And off of that partnership, we've been able to see a, again, massive success in coordinating our ecosystem.
Olivia: (06:30)
Breaking down the funding and resourcing side of your role is super helpful as that is often top of mind for our listeners working in local government and really interesting that it's at the intersection of academia philanthropy. And of course the advocacy of your CIO. Also, you mentioned at the start some pretty shocking stats around the lack of access to reliable internet. How were those stats presented to senior leaders to get their body in? And how did the data actually support the creation of your role in the first place?
Joshua: (07:00)
So the big piece on the data, uh, there's a huge deficiency on data for digital inclusion, huge. And so the statistics that you hear me referencing are coming from the American community survey and the American community survey is pulled every year. Uh, unfortunately there is a bit of a lag on it. So even the data that you hear me mentioning on this call, well, that's coming from 2019. And so as we're looking at the 2020 data, that's going to be everything that we did, you know, during the pandemic, which is massive. However, the, before my role even started, this was something where the national digital inclusion Alliance, they release every single year, the least connected cities list. And, uh, on that list, Detroit ranks very high, very high specifically when we look at cities of 100,000 residents or more, and at the time of my hiring, we were the least connected city in America.
Joshua: (07:57)
And since my hiring, we're no longer the least connected city in America. And I feel really great about that. Um, but with that being said, that the data that we had really did frame, um, the intervention and specifically our chief information officer, and I'm going to keep going back, that's where this starts our chief information officer, knowing the data, knowing the disparity and being able to say, how can we act? And so we need better data. We need more informed data, but we have enough data through the American community survey to say, yeah, we can begin railing our community, uh, respectively, to be able to look at outcomes and change the narrative. And along the way, we need to be collecting better data as it relates to sentiment analysis. How do our residents feel about our internet offerings specifically? How much are people paying? The data on affordability needs to be critical to the, and so really we're transitioning from the alight let's describe the problem.
Joshua: (09:00)
We're well aware of that. And I think we've been well aware of that. And most cities are specifically, if you're not, you know, before last year, you definitely are now, uh, around the, the digital disparity in our community, but now it's taking it one step further to say, all right, we know what that is. Let's actually measure impact at scale. And that's get a better understanding of why isn't this penetration working. Why is it that we can distribute hundreds of thousands of devices yet we're still feeling like we're missing the mark. And I think that's where, um, you hear a more sophisticated conversation brewing under this surface of getting that better data to inform better decision-making to then be able to say to the federal government, Hey, we've got something sustainable here. That's not dependent on philanthropy. And there's true impact that scale that can happen off of this model.
Olivia: (09:46)
We'll talk in just a few moments about what you're currently working on as well as some of your creative interventions. But before we jump into that, it would be really great to unpack what you just raised on the importance of measuring impact and how there is some data that presents, you know, enough of a business case to understand that there is a problem, but how do you actually take that further? And what are some of your strategies to take a deeper dive and better understand the digital divide issues in your community?
Joshua: (10:15)
So a lot of what we've been able to do, it's a combination of factors and specifically what I, how Joshua Edmonds, I approach this work. This is a lot of this is like personal to me. So when we began working with, uh, churches, well, my father is a minister. So like there's a justification already there, but taking it one step further on people's lived experiences. I have a history of just a variety of different digital inclusion roles. But my one that was really, really influential was me starting in public housing. So I was working in public housing and my whole job was to push president Obama's connect home initiative, which is really focusing on how do we get more, uh, public housing estates connected to the internet, specifically the residents. Now I remember I did about 60 different focus groups, uh, with residents. And during that time, I remember there was one meeting that stuck with me.
Joshua: (11:10)
I got up and said, Hey, there's this really great program by an internet provider that I'm not going to name. And it is for low-income residents. And I just, even now when I said I kind of cringe, but, um, there was a resident raise your hand said, Hey, look, man, I might not be the richest person in the world, but I'm not low income. I don't refer to me as I have a lifetime of achievements and for you to like belittle me to being low-income do better. And man have I, that, that, that nugget of information is what carries me. So when we began talking about data, there's a narrative behind it and how people want to be treated, how people want to be addressed. And so now it's not just a, let's get people, computers, and internet. These are people who are in our community, who are one day going to be purchasing, uh, resources online to support a small business.
Joshua: (11:54)
These are people whose kids are going to be the engineers for tomorrow working in and our Ford and general motors plants in Detroit. And so now this transitions beyond just the data points to looking at the lives of people that we're working with. And so my approach to this is like, Hey, I live this, I'm seeing this. I live in a, one of the neighborhoods that is not necessarily when, when you're looking at Detroit. When I say where I live, this isn't one of those areas. It's like, oh wow, you're downtown or Midtown. Like, no, I'm deep in one of these neighborhoods where the digital disparity is very, very in my face. And so when we began even last year, we distributed over in total about 75,000 computers to residents and as well as internet access, providing tech support to those families. And when I was architecting, a lot of those endeavors, I had to take those calls from my car because I had such terrible internet in my house.
Joshua: (12:50)
And so when people are talking to us about, oh, we need more wifi, we need more of this or that. I see it. I can see the intersection between the larger data point and the lived reality behind it. And so when you see us being very creative, in some cases over the top with our interventions, it's because of that larger narrative that we are very, very sensitive to. And I think that then informs the way that we operate. That then informs the way we approach the data by saying, that's a great point. We know we need to work at that, but the prevailing narrative behind that, that people want that digital dignity. Now we're not going to refer to them as just the poor, the low-income, the, whatever that this is a family that can essentially drive Detroit's future and being able to approach it from that lens is really what we're trying to establish in Detroit.
Olivia: (13:34)
That's really powerful. I especially resonated with your point on the importance of personal narrative when trying to better understand data. And I also appreciate you sharing some of your own personal story as well. Now, the suspense has been building, we've mentioned that you've been working on some creative interventions and now is the time for you to actually share with us some of those interventions. And we'd love to learn more about what you're actually working on to tackle the digital divide.
Joshua: (14:00)
And so, yeah, I, I'm really excited to share this because, uh, one of the things that we really want to focus on is exporting this model much more. Thankfully, we've been able to talk to a number of other cities that I'll mention later on, but specifically what we've been able to create is Connect 313, Connect 313 is not a nonprofit. It is not a for-profit. Connect 313 is a brand, so to speak. And so when we begin looking at what connector in three has been able to do, I think it makes a lot more sense for us to look at contextually where it came from. So I remember sitting, um, maybe in a bar, um, just thinking through, how do we get better? How do we get everyone to buy in to what we're doing? Because if it's just the city saying something, well, then people are just gonna look at this as just the city's program.
Joshua: (14:50)
But the problem is cities aren't really equipped to bridge the digital divide. Cities are equipped to be able to facilitate and orchestrate the ecosystem accordingly, but cities don't make devices like computers and cities do not own internet specifically, if you're not a municipal broadband network, if you are then more power to you, but most large cities are not that. And so since we know that, then we have a really unique role. And so I always tell the story of, uh, and I'll do it in a summarized capacity here, but this the stone soup model, where there is travelers who went to a town and they, their first house, they go to, they ask for a full meal. They said, Hey, we're starving. Do you all have just anything we can eat? And they're like, no, we don't. So they go around to every single house, no one had anything to offer them.
Joshua: (15:35)
So then they said, wait a second. We did this wrong. They go back to the first house and said, Hey, dude, just have a pot. Second house. Hey, do you just have water? Hey, you just have salt. You just have tomatoes. Do you just have whatever? And then they were able to create a soup for the entire community. And that is what connect 3, 1 3 is because we began looking at it. I was on this the wrong way. At the beginning, I was asking for like $2 million, $5 million, $10 million. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the way to do this. It's really, Hey, general motors. I know that you are focusing on electric vehicles and the future mobility means a lot, but in order for us to really bridge this digital divide, to make sure those electric vehicles are really not only built by Detroiters, but driven by Detroiters it behooves us to invest in this digital equity pipeline.
Joshua: (16:21)
And then the same thing goes with, Hey, local bank. I noticed that you all have a real keen investment specifically as it relates to online banking. And I know that you all want to be able to service more Detroiters, but if you don't invest in this pipeline, you don't get more clients for online banking. The same thing I said to my hospital systems, the same thing I said to my corporations who are looking to hire talent, Quicken loans, they're the they're America's largest mortgage lending conglomerate. They're headquartered in Detroit. And in order for Quicken loans, to be able to hire workers who are going to be able to then make the case to be better taxpayers in Detroit, better earners in Detroit, we need to be investing in that talent pipeline. This all goes back to this digital divide. So then we said, all right, fine.
Joshua: (17:06)
If this is the case and you all all see your respective role in this ecosystem, might there be a way where we can all conglomerate under one, one logo, which is then connect through on three. And so what we've done thus far, uh, first order of business was establishing a social enterprise and so human IT, uh, they are a national nonprofit. It's also enterprise that collects technology. We furnaces that technology and redistributed to it's. It's a residence now I over simplified it, but in essence, that's how they operate. And so in Detroit, we're thankful that they have a headquarter here. They have hired over 30 Detroiters, and these folks are the ones who are providing tech support to families, providing devices to families. So now I don't have to think about where devices coming from. We've already figured that part out. Thank goodness. And some of the aforementioned organizations I name Quicken loans, general motors.
Joshua: (18:02)
They're the ones who funded them because they said, wow, if you can get residents computers, and you can train residents, we can hire those residents. And so now it's like, people are acting in their own self interests, but that's great. That's what we want. That's sustainable there. And so one getting human it up and running in Detroit, that was pivotal. The other piece that we did, and this was towards the beginning of the year, uh, last year, uh, we raised $23 million of our mainly private capital within the city to get every single public school student, a computer internet access, and a tech support provided by human. It, that was over 51,000 computers and technology packages. We distributed to families and, uh, last year alone, within a six month sprint, Human IT took over 30,000 tech support calls from families. Um, but in addition to that, because it wasn't just all about the students.
Joshua: (18:54)
We received about $4 million from the state of Michigan, looking at connecting seniors to telehealth opportunities. In Detroit, we worked with our local research university, Wayne state, who then on the backend, use their physicians to be able to then, um, um, provide better support for those families as it relates to their, um, online health portal access. And so now what you're starting to see is this deviation from on one hand, we call that connecting seniors. So there's a connected futures for students connecting seniors for seniors, obviously, and earlier this year, we've got the green light to then do connecting mothers. So locally, how are we connecting, um, mothers in Detroit around, uh, birth resources, but doing that digitally. And then in addition, we want to even now focusing on connecting veterans and we're going to keep doing these connecting campaigns because we already have the infrastructure to do this.
Joshua: (19:45)
We've established a connect 313 fund. So now we can even support community. We did a community election and now we have community representatives who can raise their hand and say, Hey, I want to have X in my community. We have a fund that is specifically there to support them because we know that this work doesn't happen without community and community needs to own this work. And so then what do I do? I'm facilitating this. And so connect 313 three has been great to be able to one get national and federal and statewide funding for whatever we want to do for whatever campaign we want to run. We have that infrastructure in place. We also have a fund that is dedicated to community projects for community ownership. In addition to that, we've even been able to leverage the help of celebrities like Jason Mamoa, who plays Aquaman in justice league.
Joshua: (20:33)
He came to Detroit and him and I did a video together, really looking at how do we one get more attention to the digital divide and activate more relationships around Connect 313. And so now we're at this really great inflection point as we look at what's happening in Washington, as we look at what's happening in our, in our city specifically, how do we go even better? How do we go further? So the other areas we're focusing on our neighbor technology hubs, uh, how do we support those specifically? In addition to neighbor technology helps, how do we get better data? And that is already coming out of our connect 313 fund. So a lot of what we use in our interventions on the tactical side, but we're still thinking strategically, how do we do this better,
Olivia: (21:11)
Really exciting stuff. You've convinced me now. I want to invest in Connect 313. It's quite powerful, how you were able to unite several different actors through emphasizing the what's in it for them. And how that in turn has led to an outpour support for tackling the digital divide. There's still a lot that we'd love to learn from you and your team. Joshua. We look forward to welcoming you again next week, where we'll focus in on how you actually operationalize a lot of this work across all areas internally within your municipality.
Lindsay: (21:43)
We'll be back next week with Joshua to continue the conversation about digital inclusion. So stay tuned for an exciting follow on episode where we'll focus on key strategies to embed digital inclusion efforts across the city and takeaways on how to break down internal silos. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.