In part two of our focus on Detriot's Digital Inclusion, Olivia from our team is back with Joshua Edmonds, Detroit's director of digital inclusion to continue the conversation on bridging the digital divide. They'll get into concrete examples on how to effectively embed this work across an entire municipality.
Detroit is working tirelessly to implement a city-wide sustainable digital inclusion strategy on behalf of the a hundred thousand plus residents without fixed broadband access. From leveraging a creative win-win strategy for getting buy-in from important stakeholders to taking the time to discuss and engage locally with the community, the city of Detroit has already managed to shift the dial on digital inclusion in just over two years.
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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. This week, Olivia from our team is back with Joshua Edmonds, Detroit's director of digital inclusion to continue the conversation on bridging the digital divide. They'll get into concrete examples on how to effectively embed this work across an entire municipality. So I'll turn now to Olivia and director of digital inclusion, Joshua Edmonds.
Olivia: (00:42)
Joshua. It's great to have you back again. Can you quickly remind our listeners of your role in and set the stage for us?
Joshua: (00:49)
So Joshua Edmonds, the director of digital inclusion at the city of Detroit, we are the first municipal government to house this 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.
Olivia: (01:13)
Thank you for that. One of the challenges you might face is the fact that digital inclusion is at the heart of so much of what a city does and how it engages with its residents. You've shared some concrete examples in the previous episode as well, but we'd love to learn more about how you actually embed your work across what I would assume to be several different parts of the city of Detroit internal operations.
Joshua: (01:36)
Yeah, that's actually one of the most challenging areas. And honestly, I'm so thankful for 2019 before 2020, because that was the time that I spent building those relationships. So I had kind of like a internal thing driving me where I'm like, all right, I'm going to go to a minimum of three community events a week. Uh, and that was what I did all 2019. So, um, I was very busy. I went through a lot of business cards, but in that I was able to start seeing other departmental priorities. Because again, I did it wrong in the beginning. In the beginning, I tried to come in with this larger strategy and saying, Hey, city departments, this is what I'm doing. Yeah. That didn't really go too well, but I flipped it around and I got smart enough that I didn't invest too much into that style. I said, okay, what are they already doing? And then how can I support that better?
Joshua: (02:25)
So for example, we have an office of sustainability that is really focusing on the environment. I said, okay, well, human IT is running an operation that is looking at their purchasing of electronic waste. We're actually supporting you offices sustainability. And they're like, yeah, you're right. You are like, yes. Um, then in addition to that, we have another department, uh, it's called CRIO, which has civil rights, inclusion and opportunity. And they were very influential and getting, uh, what we refer to as Detroit means business off the ground. It's really just, um, a fantastic network supporting small businesses in Detroit. Well, we know that small business owners are Detroiters who are on the wrong side of the digital divide. I always give the story about when I first moved to Detroit, I was looking for apple pie and I remember I was just really hungry for it.
I Googled the best apple pie in Detroit and I got it and it was awful. And I realized that it was not the best apple pie in Detroit. It was literally the people who were best at search engine optimization in Detroit who sold apple pies. And so that then allows us to be able to say, Hey, how do we work together on the small business front to make sure that more businesses have more visibility online. Now you're tapping into what we do at Connect 313. And so what I now am doing and really strategically focused on existing departmental priorities and then supporting opposed to coming in with a strategy that might be perfect. It can be perfect, but if it doesn't come in supporting first, then it's not going to work because under your question that you're asking was a lot of lessons that I had to learn, yeah, there was a lot of national attention about the hiring of my role.
Joshua: (04:01)
A lot of people picked up on it and it was great, but the problem was internally one, uh, um, elephant in the room. I'm young. Like that is that's. That's true. I mean, in city government, you have a lot of people who are there who are lifers. So I'm coming in. I have to essentially convince them that, Hey, I'm a, I'm about this. I know what I'm talking about, and this is why we need to work together. So there was already a hill to climb on that point. In addition to that in a lot of our legacy cities, there's no shortage of problems. And so you almost have to convince why digital inclusion is something we need to be focusing on in addition to poverty, in addition to violence, in addition to whatever else you want to throw on top of that.
Joshua: (04:42)
And so just being very, very strategic with those conversations and being able to keep digital inclusion at the malleable level, instead of trying to get, keep it rigid and control the narrative. And so those are some of the tips that I had to learn that have gone a very long way, but it took a lot of me failing forward to get to a comfortable point of building those relationships with other departments. And I'll even say this now, I still have a way to go with other departments. There are still things that I would like to see where we have a better relationship, but the thing is we're working, we're building that momentum. And now that we've been able to empower the mayor much more, that then translates very well with some of the other departments that we're still working towards to find something where we can work together in a more mutual fashion.
Olivia: (05:25)
Busting silos, which is always a hard, hard thing to do in local government, it kind of comes back to what you've shared before, just around that strategic communications and just not just saying, Hey, support what I'm doing, but rather how can we mutually help each other? And it seems like that's been a really solid approach. Shifting gears a little bit, thinking about some of the folks that you're trying to engage with, the community and, you know, emphasizing the fact that we are continuously engaging online and a lot of community engagement increasingly is done virtually. How did you engage with residents to get their opinions, to consult with them around the digital divide when they're not always the easiest to get in contact with? What were some of your strategies there?
Joshua: (06:12)
Well, again, we've benefited greatly from 2019. Any community that's trying to do this now, best of luck. And I'm not saying that that, that, that it's impossible, but it's very, very difficult if that trust wasn't built at the onset before the pandemic. What I mentioned earlier about me going to all those community events, those minimum of three a week, that's me speaking at churches, that's me going to community meetings. And honestly, I was just going there really just to talk about the digital divide. I didn't even have a strategy that I, you know, one felt comfortable sharing because the community didn't give feedback on the strategy. So it was like, what does it look like? Me presenting a perfect strategy without any community input or buy-in like, it, it doesn't go anywhere. And so that entire time in 2019 was really me just building those relationships, showing up to people and saying, yes, I see you. I hear your concerns.
Joshua: (07:01)
And a lot of those times, no one was even mentioning internet. No one was even mentioning the digital divide whatsoever. And it wasn't that it was something that, you know, didn't exist. But as I was looking at all of those problems, I began realizing that there's a compounding and you're not going to find a single resident. Well, and if you do, I'll eat my words here, but you're not going to find a single resident. That's going to say, yeah, I am fully empowered and the one thing I'm not, I don't have internet. That's just so unlikely. Like there are people who are literally carrying so many other things with them that it's very difficult to sift through all that and say, oh yeah, I forgot. I don't have internet either. Oh yeah, I forgot. I don't have a computer either.
Joshua: (07:39)
And so as I'm listening to this, I'm listening to pain. I'm listening to people who are disenfranchised, and now I'm using that to say, okay, you haven't had your voice heard on this occasion or on that occasion. I hear you. And so what we have now built when you hear me talking about that community election, that community governance process, people being able to submit that and community voice that's coming from that. And so, um, since late July of last year, thanks to a partnership between Microsoft Quicken loans, um, and United Way in the city of Detroit, we created, uh, that Connect 313 fund. And before we even began doing implementations, no joke. This is a very, very long process. And I learned the value of endurance during this. Since late July, all the way to December. We had meetings every single day with residents and community.
Joshua: (08:33)
I am not stressed every single day and we're walking them through, this is the charter that we're creating. What words do you not agree with? Okay, this is the process. Is there anything else that we need to add? We had hundreds of meetings and that was something where yeah, we probably could have did the alternative, which is all right, this is all we can move forward. Uh, this is the process. This is that we could have did that within one month, but we took six months walking through every little bit and making sure we had, uh, people's voice being heard and crafting what we're doing. Now, did we get every single resident in the world to participate? No. Um, I would have loved if we had more residential participation, but I'm thankful enough that all of the stuff that we did in 2019 and building that, and then all of a sudden we did in 2020 specifically engaging people and keeping them in the loop and making our beings as open as possible to then craft where we are.
Joshua: (09:27)
And I think that the biggest value that we had, and I think this is where people are missing the mark. And so if there's one thing I can tell cities to really, really focused on it's the values. Because that's where the community really started holding us to that. So one of our values that we always say internally is that we're locally led and we're expertly informed. So very rarely are you going to see an expert come into Detroit or specifically within Connect 313 and then them leading, and then the people behind them, it's the other way around. And so this is just something where the minute there was perceptions of those values being violated, community members are saying, whoa, whoa, I thought you said you were a locally led, expertly informed. And were like, we are, and this is how this works out specifically because another value we have is we prioritize transparency when we progress at the speed of trust.
Joshua: (10:13)
And so if residents don't trust us, we don't move forward. And I think that's just been something where we've been able to get that respect from people. And we've been able to circulate those values in a way where people are like, all right, cool. The last piece on participation, but we have a community council that community council was open to anyone who lives in Detroit, works in Detroit or learns in Detroit. And so with that infrastructure in place, now, I don't have to worry about someone saying, well, what does the community think I'm like, can we please give them their feedback there? Now, all I had to do was just orchestrate and brag about the amazing partners in our ecosystem and do great things like this because we've already figured out like the heavier parts. And because we took the harder path on all those meetings and building trust that now has manifested in what I'm talking about right now.
Olivia: (11:00)
A lot of really important lessons that you just raised. I want to emphasize the point around stakeholder engagement that's actually effective takes time. And sometimes local governments, I feel like we enter into community engagement in a very transactional way, not taking into account the amount of time that it actually takes to build trust and really impressive that you made that decision in your planning to actually spend all of that time, having those conversations. And it's definitely has shown lots of great results so far, so really important lesson there, and really appreciate the point as well on values and how that's a great way for the community to then clearly hold you and your team accountable. So really appreciated all of those nuggets of wisdom. Thank you. So you've been in your role for almost two and a half years now, what do you think you've done well and what do you wish you could have done better? And I know you've mentioned some of this in your answers already, but just like really quickly, what are some lessons learned that you'd like to share?
Joshua: (12:04)
Well, I think I've done a really good job of building momentum and inertia here, and honestly, lighting a smoke signal so high that like other folks are seeing it nationally and globally. Uh, you know, in the beginning of 2020, uh, thanks to some incredible advocacy from a lot of folks, I testified in front of Congress on the matter of digital equity last January. And that hearing was the most terrifying moment of my life. But at the same time, it really solidified me and allowed me to get rid of a lot of imposter syndrome I had around, uh, you know, I kind of know my stuff a little bit. It's like, no, no, no, no, I know what I'm talking about here. And I know the best path forward. And so I think I've done a really good job of telling that collective narrative and that story to a variety of stakeholders who literally have power to change outcomes.
Joshua: (12:57)
And so that has been fantastic. What I really wish I would have did a better, um, you know, I, I didn't have a career in government before this. And so when I came in, I wasn't actually thinking politically, I was actually just thinking with my heart to be honest. Um, because I care about this stuff. I legitimately care. I care a lot, a lot more than I even thought I did. Uh, and with that being said, there were certain times when the work was criticized and I took that personally and I'm like, man, it's not meant to be, but I did because I'm putting, I'm putting everything into this. Like when people see what's being built, yeah, it's bold and it's this and that, but I'm like, man, that's my heart in that. And so when things didn't go right, or when things didn't go as planned or we wanted something better, I was taking that personally.
Joshua: (13:44)
And so I would say that for the government folks, I know they're understanding exactly what I'm expressing here, but that's something that I really wish I would have been better of protecting my own emotional state when things went awry that I really didn't have control over. I wish I would've had a different mindset because I took on a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety trying to control things that were just really out of my control.
Olivia: (14:08)
Entering a government for the first time and some of the bureaucracy and that entire machine can be a little bit overwhelming. I certainly felt that way when I joined local government for the first time. But you're definitely on the other side of it and navigating all of local government, which is great. Your passion for bridging the digital divide is evident. What advice would you share to local government practitioners looking to establish their first ever directorship of digital inclusion?
Joshua: (14:39)
Hmm. Well, I think though the advice would be to really adopt a gamer's mindset. I know that probably sounds like way left field, but play to win. I mean, I'm a to win, like don't bury this person. There are so many of my colleagues who are doing fantastic work and other cities who are not empowered to be those directors of digital inclusion. Most city governments today have, have a me in there, they're just not empowered. And so give these people the power, put them at the appropriate level and then allow them to not only fail, but allow them to articulate a bold vision. And I think that you'll be really surprised with what they come up with.
Olivia: (15:21)
I love that bold and empowered, great words of wisdom. Shifting gears a bit, do you know of any other standout innovation and another local authority that we should check out?
Joshua: (15:33)
Well, I'll just list the cities because, um, sometimes a lot of this stuff is in flux, but I will say the city of Baltimore Mayor Scott has really taking a profound, bold stance on not only hiring your director of digital inclusion, which is fantastic, but they're working really well with their state. So they have this alignment with their federal government what's happening in Washington, obviously their state, and now the major locality that is fantastic. And we should be exploring that much more. In addition, Charlotte, North Carolina. North Carolina is home to one of the best state broadband offices in the country. And so the fact that Charlotte as expanding the role that digital Charlotte, that's, that's probably the best way I can look at, you know, the equivalent of Connect 313 but digital Charlotte and what they're doing there at the local level.
Joshua: (16:21)
Incredible. Uh, I know that I have to always mention San Jose because they have just a great work there. Jordan Sun does a fantastic job. So anything that Jordan does, I'm just going to fanboy over. Um, but realistically there's just several cities that are, are getting it. I'll say my native of Cleveland, Ohio. Uh, they have been able to do a fantastic job recently. They're one of the recipients of the US ignite and national science foundation overcome grant specifically to an organization called digital C. They were one primarily funded philanthropically, but now we're seeing that investments and, uh, philanthropic investments are now yielding other national investments. And I think that the work that they're doing in Cleveland is a model that needs to be expanded. And I do think people need to keep an eye on what's happening in Cleveland.
Olivia: (17:10)
Thanks for those. And just another shout out to Jordan Sun. We interviewed him for Govlaunch as well. So definitely check out the San Jose podcast on Govlaunch. We're always looking for new products and innovation or insights into some leading products out there. Can you share with me a gov tech product you use that you'd highly recommend and why?
Joshua: (17:31)
Yes, I feel bad because it's not even the most sophisticated, but Typeform has been life-changing for us. Uh, so we have a lot of different stakeholders that we have to engage with, uh, with connecting with them three, again, you're talking about corporations of our residents. I'm on community groups. Typeform has been our way of being able to take these really, really comprehensive documents. And then to be able to get feedback in a way of like, all right, just five quick questions. And that has been something that I cannot overstate enough because the alternative of what we were doing in the past was so bad that now you just hear me saying, oh, thank you for Typeform. I know that there are other people who already are familiar with it or already using it. So I'm sorry, I'm not saying something profoundly innovative there, but sometimes less is more. It's been a great tool in helping us build community in a really succinct way.
Olivia: (18:29)
That's exactly what we're looking to hear because at the end of the day, if it's a simple and it's helping you do your work, then that's exactly the types of tools that we love to learn about. So great. Thanks for sharing that. Lastly, what's something that excites you, but the future of civic innovation in Detroit?
Joshua: (18:47)
Well, there are a lot of things that excite me. One, the fact that I now have a deputy director, so not only am I the first director now, my deputy is the first deputy director for digital inclusion. So one that excites me because now we're talking about succession planning. Now we're talking about changing of leadership. And so now I'm looking at wow. You know, I've had experience after experience focusing on the digital divide, and that has crafted the way that I do this work. But imagine if we could take someone whose background isn't digital inclusion and empower them to then get it. Um, I don't know why I'm so excited about that, but I am, because now I'm like, oh, this can be replicated. This can be scaled. You don't have to come into this as an expert. You have a heart, you care. Well, great.
Joshua: (19:36)
You know, I also look at the role that Microsoft has been playing. Microsoft has been a phenomenal, fantastic partner. I cannot stress that enough. And so when I began looking at the role that Microsoft has been playing specifically in activating national dollars and then fueling that locally in Detroit, that means something I think, as we look at the future, as we look at roles at Microsoft saying, how do we look at criminal justice and restorative justice and racial equity? Well, we're a city that is 85% African-American. And so at that point, we're looking at these larger corporate statements that are being said, and we're seeing the way that that can potentially, and that already has manifested in Detroit. So the future does not necessarily look like more corporate resources allocated to Detroit, but it does look like empowerment in a way where what we've already been able to do is going to get that backing from these larger national, um, corporations and players.
Joshua: (20:31)
The last thing that I'll say that I'm really excited about is our ability to continuously, um, influence the national narrative as it relates to this specific topic. So earlier, um, about three weeks ago, we had a conversation with commissioner Starks from the federal communications commission and he and I spoke to five Detroit public schools students about their experience or the pandemic and distance learning. And those talking points that were created in that were then used to help craft the legislation that we're seeing, going into effect now specifically covering distance learning costs for schools and libraries. And so I'm very excited to see how the momentum from these current conversations are going to continuously carry into Washington and vice versa.
Olivia: (21:23)
We're looking forward to seeing more cities focus their efforts on bridging the digital divide, just like Detroit is. Thanks so much for joining us, Joshua.
Joshua: (21:31)
I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Lindsay: (21:39)
Detroit is working tirelessly to implement a city-wide sustainable digital inclusion strategy on behalf of the a hundred thousand plus residents without fixed broadband access. From leveraging a creative win-win strategy for getting buy-in from important stakeholders to taking the time to discuss and engage locally with the community, the city of Detroit has already managed to shift the dial on digital inclusion in just over two years. We look forward to seeing more cities adopt this approach and to create space for their very own directorship of digital inclusion. To stay informed on this project and others visit us at Govlaunch. 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.