Why Low-Income Communities Are Building Their Own Internet Networks

With major telecommunication companies not offering broadband in poorer neighborhoods, community organizers are training locals to manage and implement their own networks to create equity and opportunities. In Detroit (MI), the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII) is stepping up to meet that need. In 2016, the Detroit Community Technology Project–a nonprofit founded in 2014 to train community organizers in setting up neighborhood-level internet access–launched EII to increase internet access in three particularly underserved neighborhoods in Detroit, and to educate those very community members who will benefit from the internet in installing and managing it. Diana Nucera directs the DCTP, which the Detroit-based company Allied Media Projects sponsors with funds from the Obama administration’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. The big question at the time of DCTP’s founding was “whether Detroit was even worth saving,” Nucera says. “People were more interested in the devastation of Detroit than in its resiliency.”