[Ccan-announce] New Digital Inclusion Fund a Reality!

[Catherine Settanni]

I am happy to report that an agreement between the City of Minneapolis, USI
Wireless, the Digital Inclusion Task Force and The Minneapolis Foundation
has been signed, and we now have a Digital Inclusion Fund at the Foundation!

This fund will be overseen by a community advisory board, and has an initial
balance of $200,000 with another $300,000 payment due when the network is
completed (Nov 2007).

Funding guidelines and the appointment process for future DIF Advisory Board
members are being developed now by the Digital Inclusion Task Force. We will
issue these guidelines and information about applying to serve on the
volunteer board, or committees of this board in the coming months.
Information will be disseminated using this listserv and email lists we have
from the work we all did last year securing this Fund. If you know of other
interested parties, please forward this announcement to them so they can
sign up for this list, or send a letter of inquiry to Digital Access, PO Box
6877, Minneapolis 55406.

It is expected that the first RFP for grants will go out sometime this
summer, and focus on programs that will help Minneapolis¹ low income
residents access this new wireless network and improve their technology
literacy skills. 

Thanks go out to everyone who helped in this effort, especially staff at the
Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, Digital Inclusion Coalition members and
final report authors, and DI Task Force members, all of whom put in many
hours to ensure that a strong community benefit agreement was reached during
the vendor selection and negotiation process.

Chicago, Houston and Oakland are looking to now emulate our success:)
-----

Catherine Settanni
Wireless Minneapolis
Digital Inclusion Task Force
catherine at digitalaccess.org
http://www.digitalaccess.org




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mapnp.Geeks.ORG/pipermail/ccan-announce/attachments/20070207/7cfee628/attachment.html