Abi Waldrupe

On Sunday, January 25, 2026, National Digital Inclusion Alliance Executive Director Angela Siefer received an email with the subject line “Help Needed in Minnesota.” By Monday morning, we were on a call with the leaders of the Hopkins Digital Access Initiative—Rebekah Crosby, Carolyn Leslie, and Beth Kivett—forging a new partnership to address urgent digital inclusion needs in Hopkins, a first-ring Minneapolis suburb, a community flooded with ICE and CPB agents.

The enduring challenge of sustainability is now more crucial than ever for digital inclusion programs. A new series of three briefs from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) highlights best practices in the foundations of sustainable programs: intentional community impact, diligent data collection and analysis, and mission-aligned storytelling.

When we discussed project highs and lows with the program managers of the National Digital Navigator Corps cohort, they often mentioned their digital navigators as the best part of their programs and the times they transitioned to new digital navigators as the most challenging. These times of transition led to some great lessons learned about preparing for turnover in the digital navigator position, expanding and scaling work with additional digital navigators, and ensuring consistency across services provided by digital navigators with different levels of experience. 

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance launched the 2025 Digital Navigator Program Toolkit. It provides guidance for setting up and managing successful digital navigator programs. The authors of the toolkit are experts from the NDIA team who have experience training, supporting, and learning from hundreds of digital navigators and programs providing digital navigator services across the country. The toolkit takes readers from conception to execution to sustaining a digital navigator program, with concrete tools and advice from practitioners across the country. 

In the last two years, members from our National Digital Navigator Corps have learned a lot from working on the ground in their communities, and we’re excited to share their insights, stories, and lessons with you! This is the first in a series of blogs about their experiences and what we can all learn from them, and in 2025, we’ll publish an updated digital navigator toolkit full of practical guidance. Here’s a sample of the things we’ve learned about digital navigators in rural and Native communities in particular:

This manual supports States, Territories, and the District of Columbia as they implement their digital equity plans and create sustainable, robust statewide digital equity ecosystems.