Black Churches 4 Digital Equity: Community Anchors and Committed Advocates

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Digital Beat

Black Churches 4 Digital Equity:
Community Anchors and Committed Advocates

The Human Infrastructure of Broadband: Looking Back, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead Following up on the release of The Human Infrastructure of Broadband: Looking Back, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead, we are providing examples of core, complementary, and coalition models for digital equity work. This series of organizational profiles delves deeply into how these programs work, the problems they are best suited to solve, the populations they are best suited to reach, and the support they need to succeed. Learn more about the Human Infrastructure of Broadband Project.


“She said, ‘You know, Pam, I really hate hearing that ACP is ending. But okay, what’s next? What do you need from us next?’ And so, for me, I measure that as very much a success. It shows that all the education that we did, we can see that it worked, because now they understand the why. ‘I can't allow this issue to kind of fall by the wayside because this digital equity conversation is connected to everything.’ It was a success of seeing. Look, if we can touch [Black churches] and give them the right information and tools, they are willing and able to continue serving really as these anchor institutions for our community.”

                                                            —Mississippi Church Leader Miss Belinda

For Pam Price, a fellow with Black Churches 4 Digital Equity, this conversation with Miss Belinda, a local church leader doing Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) enrollment in Mississippi, was surprisingly reassuring in the midst of the disappointment of the ACP’s winding down. As part of the fellowship, Price and her organization helped coordinate ACP enrollment efforts. Miss Belinda’s response to the program’s end reminded Pam that the success of Black Churches 4 Digital Equity can be measured not just in the short-term gains in ACP enrollment but also, in the longer term, in the new commitment among Black churches to the goals of digital equity.

Price is the deputy director of the nonprofit The Balm in Gilead and has participated in the Black Churches 4 Digital Equity Fellowship since its inception three years ago. Black Churches 4 Digital Equity is a project of the Multicultural Media, Telecom, and Internet Council (MMTC), a nearly four-decade-old civil rights nonprofit advocating for equity and inclusion in media and telecommunications. MMTC Vice President of Policy Dr. Fallon Wilson helped launch the program in 2020 when the organization’s broader focus on equity in telecommunications and media collided with the stark realities of the digital divide in Black communities revealed by the pandemic. At the time, Dr. Wilson said, “We should really think about how to mobilize historically Black community anchor institutions. Let’s talk about mobilizing Black churches.”

MMTC has considerable experience in training and in addressing policymakers. The new Black Churches 4 Digital Equity Fellowship program built on this expertise, educating and training church leaders about digital equity and preparing them to engage policymakers and their own constituents.

“We seek to build a movement of Black church leaders advocating and mobilizing for digital equity,” says Dr. Wilson.

Fundamentally, Black Churches 4 Digital Equity is coalition-building work, but what makes it unique is that it brings together organizations—namely, churches and other faith-based organizations, for which digital equity work is complementary rather than core to their missions.

The Fellowship gathered together leaders in Black churches small and large as well as nonprofits embedded in faith networks, like Price’s The Balm in Gilead. Fellows initially came together in monthly meetings, where they learned about digital equity terminology and ecosystems, received training on how to understand and leverage data, and discussed strategies for bringing this knowledge back to their communities. Pam Price describes this first year as “shoring up the education gap in our communities” around digital equity.

The ACP became a key focus of the Fellows’ work, especially during the second year of the Fellowship. When federal leaders were considering creating the ACP, Fellows activated their networks to advocate for the program. Black Churches 4 Digital Equity sent a support letter signed by 407 Black church leaders to then–Vice President Kamala Harris. And churches represented by the fellowship hosted a week of nationwide community activations. Eventually, the coalition received an ACP Outreach Grant from the Federal Communications Commission. Working with many individual Fellows as subgrantees, Black Churches 4 Digital Equity hosted local ACP sign-up events, both as part of ongoing community programming like back-to-school events and as part of a series of Black Churches 4 Digital Equity national ACP sign-up events. The Fellows even took ACP stories to the Hill, getting a crash course in national advocacy in support of digital equity.

Black Churches 4 Digital Equity acts as a connector and convener, bringing community and church leaders together for shared learning and community-building. Dr. Wilson and Digital Navigator Coordinator Alex Dirl design and disseminate resources like fact sheets, comprehensive training and organizing toolkits, and even specially designed digital-equity-themed church fans, which are particularly popular. At the same time, Dirl works one-on-one with Fellowship participants, helping them locate online resources, walking them through the federal grant reporting process, and identifying new tools that will help elevate their work.

The coalition framework creates a cascading impact. Fellows integrate digital inclusion activities into their daily work, becoming digital navigators of a sort in their own communities. They also come back together through the network to support high-impact national events, like the digital-equity-focused Juneteenth event that Black Churches 4 Digital Equity hosted in 2024 with Greater Grace Temple in Detroit. Dr. Wilson holds up this event as one of the most inspiring stories yet to have come out of the work and precisely the outcome she envisioned from the beginning: hundreds attended the event (and thousands more watched online) as a nationally recognized Black church leader “preached about digital equity from the pulpit.”

Partnership is at the heart of Black Churches 4 Digital Equity. The team offers support and tools to help individual churches host ACP sign-up events or bring digital equity trainings to their congregations. Nonprofit Fellows activate their own church partners to extend the reach of the coalition. Price’s organization, The Balm in Gilead, for instance, works with a network of churches on community-health-related initiatives. With Price serving as a Black Churches 4 Digital Equity Fellow, The Balm was able to collect data on the digital divide through an existing health-focused project and share that knowledge with the coalition. Later, when the ACP outreach got started, The Balm hosted enrollment events with church partners across its six-state service area. “Our churches opened up their doors. They gave us the space,” Price recalls, and church leaders volunteered to be trained on how to enroll people in the program.

Funding for the coalition’s work comes from a variety of sources, including philanthropic support and grants. As a project of a larger organization with a broader mission, Black Churches 4 Digital Equity also benefits from some existing organizational capacity and name recognition. The coalition remains focused on supporting the financial sustainability of the individual Fellow churches’ digital equity work. Grant funding, like the FCC’s ACP Outreach Grant, allowed the coalition and many of its Fellows to scale up enrollment and outreach events, but such funding is always time-limited, and that grant expired with the ACP itself. More recently, the organization has been training churches on how to position themselves to access upcoming digital equity funding.

What We Can Learn

Activate Community-Specific Anchor Institutions

Black Churches 4 Digital Equity is built on the recognition that Black churches play a pivotal role in disseminating information and mobilizing Black communities. The coalition’s success carries several lessons for others hoping to leverage the community power of anchor institutions to close the digital divide. Specifically, Dr. Wilson is a fierce advocate for the power and effectiveness of Black churches as movement builders and community anchors. She takes it as a marker of the coalition’s success that “organizations that are cornerstones for digital equity [are beginning to] see the value of Black churches.” In a more general sense, Black Churches 4 Digital Equity can remind organizers to take a community-rooted approach to coalition-building. In this case, organizers found that Black churches could reach a wide cross-section of the community and were already trusted service providers. That role might not be played by a church in every community, but it also is not necessarily a role played by a library or a school either. Trusted organizations may differ among various populations within one community as well. Coalition organizers should invite into the conversation institutions that serve that function, whatever form they may take.

Coalitions of “Complementary” Organizations Can Be Uniquely Impactful

By fostering a digital equity network among “complementary” organizations like churches, the coalition has been able to maximize impact by leveraging existing organizational legitimacy and capacity. Of course, there are risks in building a coalition of organizations that already have numerous commitments, but Black Churches 4 Digital Equity also sees many benefits in such an approach. The organization’s ACP support letter drew its strength from the 400-plus signatories, who, as church leaders, are not traditional digital equity advocates.

The coalition has also been successful in encouraging complementary organizations to take digital equity seriously as a cornerstone of community well-being, broadening participation in the digital equity tent. As a Fellow, Price has leveraged her nonprofit organization to shift the mindset about digital equity among an even broader community of churches. Over the past year, 25 of The Balm’s church partners proactively incorporated digital equity activities into their health ministry strategic plans. By helping complementary organizations understand how digital equity touches every facet of modern life, coalitions like Black Churches 4 Digital Equity can create impact that reverberates throughout communities for years to come.

National and Regional Coalitions Can Still Be Focused on the Grass Roots

Coalitions working at the intersection of national policies and local activation can provide essential connective tissue in the digital equity ecosystem—empowering grassroots organizations and strengthening the channels of communication that should exist between them and federal policymakers. For Black Churches 4 Digital Equity, that was possible because it is a coalition largely of and for churches, quintessentially local organizations. Reflecting on the Fellowship, Price attributes much of its success to the fact that it was driven by on-the-ground community leaders with unique expertise. The fellowship drew together church leaders from different denominations, sizes, and locations, alongside nonprofit leaders in faith-based and social-justice-oriented spaces. Fellows were able to learn from one another, which allowed them to develop more impactful local strategies and activities. And church participants in the Fellowship brought their learnings back to their own congregations through events and programming, extending the reach of the coalition into new spaces at the local level.

Leverage Existing Networks

When building the coalition, Black Churches 4 Digital Equity benefited from the reputation of MMTC, but getting the Fellowship launched quickly and sustaining its momentum was in large part due to Dr. Wilson’s extensive network. Dr. Wilson is a former professor at a historically Black college, and she has also long been closely tied to the Black church community.

“I have trusted relationships with Black churches, and they trusted me to bring them into this conversation,” Dr. Wilson notes.

The network grew through word of mouth and referrals. Not every potential coalition will enjoy such fertile recruiting ground, but this case illustrates how powerful it can be to build on authentic and established connections.

Looking Ahead

Black Churches 4 Digital Equity is adamant about playing a unique role in community digital equity work on the national, state, and local levels. The coalition can effectively integrate digital equity into events like back-to-school fairs, health ministries, and even Sunday service.

Advocacy will be an essential strategy for ensuring that Black churches remain at the table in digital equity conversations. After getting experience advocating on the national level in the ACP era, Fellows have already begun learning about state-level opportunities and processes for digital equity grantmaking. But despite Black Churches 4 Digital Equity’s considerable success in changing the conversation around Black churches and digital equity, all is not done on that front. Some churches in the Fellowship faced resistance from state broadband leaders as they sought to scale up advocacy. This experience offered a sobering reminder not just of the continued need to build trust between policymakers and communities, but also of the importance of encouraging state broadband offices to recognize the power of Black churches for closing the digital divide in Black communities.

Accessing funding will be the biggest test for the organization and the churches it works alongside. Right now, there are nearly 50 fellows in the network, with funding constraints imposing limits on the program’s growth. The “desire and excitement and willingness” are there, Dr. Wilson says. Oftentimes, Dirl emphasizes, local organizations and churches had the capacity to do this important work but needed technical assistance to secure the necessary grant funding. The coalition is currently supporting efforts by some churches to transform their fellowship halls into tech hubs, which could be a deeply impactful initiative if capacity permits. The episodic funding cycles common to philanthropy and the danger of inconsistent support can hold back the work of coalitions and their constituent organizations alike. Nevertheless, coalitions are well positioned to amplify the potential impact of grassroots community-oriented organizations through capacity-building and organizational support.

Beyond funding, Dr. Wilson is also thinking about how to “scale differently.” The coalition will need to meet both growing interest among church leaders in digital equity and increasingly diverse visions among those leaders about how to engage the work. That might include online learning modules for digital equity training and toolkits to help Black churches plug into local advocacy in a variety of ways. In the end, sustainability for this type of training, education, and advocacy coalition will require both capital and capacity.


Written by: Jess Auer​

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