Monique Tate, Co-Director of Community Tech NY (CTNY) is a Marjorie & Charles Benton Opportunity Fund fellow. As part of the Equitable Broadband in Urban America Research Group, she is focusing on the Community Tech Labs as an organizing space to build digital equity.
February 2024
I saw and lived the devastation of Detroit, Michigan. Predatory loans destroyed our city. By 2007, Detroit had the highest foreclosure rates among the largest metropolitan areas. Nearly 45,000 homes stood vacant by 2008, creating pockets of virtual wastelands in Detroit. The proverbial final straw for the ‘Motor City’ was the collapse of the auto industry. It was astounding to observe an industry—that affected one in every eight American jobs—almost crumble and disappear. Chrysler filed for bankruptcy on April 30, 2009. General Motors followed on June 1, 2009. Property tax foreclosures continued unabated. In 2013, the city of Detroit, once the literal engine of national progress, filed for bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
I was not immune from my city's misfortune. In April 2009, after 22 years at Chrysler Financial, I lost my job. I was very fortunate to receive a severance package that gave me a year of salary and a host of resources to learn new skills. As a lifelong community activist and proponent for racial justice, I volunteered at a long-standing civil rights and justice-based anchor organization, Focus: HOPE. As a volunteer, I worked with grade school artists, trained to enhance my software skills, became a Microsoft Office Specialist, and was first introduced to basic hardware skills and Digital Literacy Training. It marked the beginning of my new journey.
At Focus: HOPE, I worked with school-aged youth and young adults who lacked digital skills. These young people, at the beginning of their education or professional careers, were significantly digitally disadvantaged. How could we support this generation to succeed in our increasingly technological world? To rebuild Detroit? It couldn’t be a coincidence that Detroit was also the worst-connected city in the country. We were in a state of digital emergency. My personal mission became to both work for causes and volunteer for projects that focused on improving digital access, adoption, and literacy, in my city.
By 2011 I regained full-time employment through the Connect Your Community project, and worked on providing community internet access, digital literacy training, and computer equipment distribution to participating Detroit residents all over the city but prioritizing the 100-block Hope Village community, immediately surrounding Focus: HOPE. I was instrumental in convincing Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to donate 1,700 refurbished laptop computers to our work. The magnitude of interest in basic digital literacy training and equipment acquisition, especially by seniors, was astounding. By word of mouth alone, the requests for training grew from 10s to 100s weekly. This ultimately created waiting lists for over 1000, quickly depleting the donated inventory and shifting us to purchase equipment for the overwhelming and continuously growing interest.
But it was nearly simultaneous to this enthusiasm in 2011 when I overheard my beloved, late-husband, O’Dell Tate, the Detroit MorningSide Community President, talking with Allied Media Projects (AMP) and Open Technology Institute (OTI) about the idea of my community building our own internet. I immediately interrupted to express interest in joining the small group being established to meet with AMP & OTI and investigate the potential. This was my true introduction to community technology, the Detroit Digital Justice Principles, digital stewardship, and understanding how by building community technology, we could also build community power.
By 2012, I was part of the first cohort of “digital stewards.” The model for digital stewards is an interactive, flexible, and responsive design process developed by the AMP and OTI teams. The masterful curriculum takes invested community leaders, like me, and builds our technical skills through participatory design.
As AMP describes
Digital Stewards are to incubate and uplift digital resources in our communities. We facilitate basic literacy and advanced technical training. We design and build community wireless internet networks, administer electronics recycling/refurbishing programs, and organize neighborhood-centered technology projects. Digital stewards, in turn, are responsible for supporting and strengthening our communities through technology. My focus was and remains getting “WI-FI in MorningSide!”
In the years that have followed, I have deepened my commitment to and involvement in technology and community organizing projects, which are a direct byproduct of the multi-layered/unique skill set digital stewardship training intended to develop.
Unusual for its time, this approach attracted an incredible network of comrades. In 2013, I even represented Detroit at the International Summit for Community Wireless in Berlin, sharing our innovations in neighborhood-based communications infrastructure.
I helped build and manage the largest community network in Detroit, at North End Woodward Community Coalition for the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII). We had nine relay sites, three solar powered Wi-Fi and charging stations, and activated the first Detroit public park (Bennett Playground) with Wi-Fi. By the time I left in 2020, we were serving thousands and this community network is still growing today!
What was and remains crucial to my work as a digital steward, trainer, and community technologist is how I have come to understand the term “digital justice.” In 2014 I became actively engaged with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. I worked with and learned from my colleagues at Allied Media Projects and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition to refine and articulate the goal of our work. Digital justice is more than digital equity. Digital equity is about equal access to and the ability to effectively use technology. We train local residents as digital stewards to provide this internet access, designing and building their community networks. High-level digital skill transfer and demystifying tech are our goals for the stewards, along with creating producers.
Digital justice foregrounds community-rooted solutions, reimagining and developing technology to fit our communities rather than trying to fit our communities to existing tech. Too often, others build and expect us to use. Digital justice is about prioritizing local needs and developing or actively supporting technology solutions accordingly. Digital justice is about creating and promoting producers rather than consumers and building communication networks that resemble the human networks in our communities. Digital justice provides spaces through which people investigate community issues, generate solutions, create media, and organize together. Technology and internet access have the ability to transform our communities; we want to drive this change. We are working towards a future where populations marginalized from political and economic power can leverage internet technologies to shape the future of our neighborhoods and cities. Participating in decisions that shape our communications infrastructure is how community networks create and perpetuate community power.
Digital Justice Principles embody this perspective and are the principles we adhere to in my current work, as the co-director of Community Tech NY. They also help us ensure we have alignment, focus and commitment with like-minded partners. I came to the organization right before the pandemic, as a trainer for digital stewards. As COVID hit, like everyone else, we needed to pivot and I developed an online training strategy that we are still using today. Learning the lessons from dealing with emergencies like the COVID pandemic and Hurricane Sandy, we are emphasizing work with communities on digital communication during emergencies. Disruptions to infrastructure will impact communities like ours, and we want to ensure they have the equipment and skills to build and deploy Portable Network Kits (PNKs) and get back online. Supported by the Internet Society Foundation, we are launching a workshop series to convene and train community-based organizations from environmentally vulnerable and under-resourced communities to build and utilize PNKs as a tool for disaster preparedness and post-disaster connectivity.
Our partner in this work is El Puente, a youth-centered human rights organization based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NY) El Puente has been at the forefront of social justice initiatives, blending artivism, youth development, and grassroots community for over 40 years. We began working with El Puente in 2021, its initial foray into digital equity work. Since then, El Puente has deepened its commitment, intentionally adding digital equity and digital justice training through its Community Tech Lab. The lab helps boost community organizing power to tackle everything from air quality to public safety initiatives and civic engagement. El Puente remains determined to nurture the next generation of leaders and use the power of art and technology to advocate for equitable community sustainability and self-determination.
As a Benton Opportunity Fund fellow examining the issues of urban broadband, I will highlight the work of our community technology partner, El Puente. Through this fellowship, I will document and share how El Puente came into this work and launched its training and Community Technology Lab programs. In addition to updates here and collaborating with the other Benton fellows on an overarching report on urban broadband, we’ll be publishing a Zine, "Guide for Implementing Community Tech Labs." Sharing practitioner stories from the field, I hope to present a model of how engaging grassroots organizations on digital equity work can serve as a launch pad for building affordable broadband that is sustained by the local community.
Focusing simultaneously on technical training, and relationship building, the project leverages local resources including existing social connections to build both technology and community.