Alternative Funding Innovation Lab
Alt Funding Field Guide
Building sustainable funding for digital adoption
Federal funding for digital inclusion is more precarious than ever. Grants alone cannot sustain this work at the scale it’s needed. This series makes the case for co-investment from the sectors that quietly depend on community-based digital inclusion to deliver their outcomes: healthcare, education, workforce, housing, local government, and telecommunications. It gives practitioners the language, the evidence, and the partnership structures to start building it.
Connect Humanity has brilliantly clarified how we need to adjust our mindset and how these programs are funded to help all Americans have an opportunity to thrive in the information economy. It points to practical and financially rigorous ways that multiple stakeholders can participate in creating those opportunities.
Blair Levin — Executive Director, 2010 US National Broadband Plan
The case for co-investment
Digital inclusion isn’t a nice-to-have. It is essential infrastructure that lets healthcare systems run telehealth, schools support learners at home, employers hire from a wider talent pool, housing authorities serve residents, local governments deliver services, and ISPs grow sustainable customer bases. Each of these sectors benefits from digital inclusion. Each can help sustain it.
Connect Humanity’s framework inverts the usual logic. Instead of starting with available grants and designing programs to fit, it starts with what communities actually need (the uses of capital), identifies who captures the value when those needs are met (the repayment streams), and only then designs the funding mix to match (the sources).
That reordering moves the conversation from “how much can we get?” to “how much value can we create, and who benefits?” It lets scarce grant dollars concentrate where the economics will never fully pencil out, and unlocks new capital elsewhere.
Six sector guides — each written by a national expert — build the case for where co-investment is strongest today.
Start here
A framework for co-investing in digital adoption
The opening chapter of the series sets out why grant-dependent funding has reached its limit, and introduces the financial framework the rest of the series is built on. Samantha Schartman makes the case for change, drawing on years of practitioner experience and the lessons of successive federal funding cycles. Brian Vo lays out Connect Humanity’s approach to structuring co-investment partnerships: a capital stack built from uses, repayments, and sources, designed to match funding responsibility to where value is captured.
The view from six sectors
Education
Dr. Jen Vanek & Samantha Schartman
Education institutions carry most of the recurring cost of digital inclusion while employers, workforce systems, and local economies capture much of the benefit. This chapter maps that misalignment across K–12, postsecondary, and adult foundational education, and shows how a co-investment model — anchored by community technology programs — can address it.
Healthcare
Dr. Amy Sheon, Public Health Innovators
Digital literacy shapes how patients access care, communicate with clinicians, and manage chronic illness. Health systems have financial stakes in digital inclusion because it can reduce use of high-cost care and make delivery more efficient. This chapter presents an original ROI model that estimates the potential health sector savings when community-based programs equip patients to use digital health tools.
Telecommunications
Brian Rathbone, Doug Dawson, Jeff Sural & Samantha Schartman
Internet service providers already have a business case to support digital inclusion — empowered residents are profitable customers — and community-based digital inclusion programs are what turn residents into subscribers who stick around. This chapter shows how providers and communities can structure partnerships that benefit ISPs and communities.
Workforce Development
Samantha Schartman & Dr. Roberto Gallardo
92% of jobs now require digital skills, yet workforce systems often assume candidates arrive with the foundational skills they need, with consequences for job seekers, employers, and the wider economy. This chapter shows where to enter the workforce funding system and how to structure co-investment in digital skills as both a talent strategy and an economic development strategy.
Local Government
Aaron Schill & Abi Waldrupe, National Digital Inclusion Alliance
Local governments that invest in digital inclusion see returns across services they deliver, from utility operations and economic development to workforce outcomes and resident engagement. This chapter makes the case for municipal co-investment grounded in those efficiency gains, and shows how local government can anchor cross-sector partnerships.
Housing
Catherine Crago Blanton
Housing authorities and affordable housing providers serve residents whose access to work, education, healthcare, and benefits increasingly runs through a home internet connection. This chapter shows how housing providers can build digital access into core operations, and where co-investment partners with aligned interests can share the cost.
Chapter Contributors
Aaron Schill
National Digital Inclusion Alliance
Dr. Amy Sheon
Public Health Innovators, LLC
Brian Rathbone
Broadband Catalysts
Brian Vo
Connect Humanity
Catherine Crago Blanton
Independent Consultant
Doug Dawson
CCG Consulting
Dr. Jen Vanek
JSI Research and Training Institute | World Education Initiative
Dr. Roberto Gallardo
Purdue University
Samantha Schartman
Connect Humanity
Jeff Sural
Surral Consulting LLC
Abi Waldrupe
National Digital Inclusion Alliance
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the chapter authors and to all members of the Alternative Funding Working Group who provided comments and guidance throughout. We are particularly grateful to Blair Levin and Karen Mossberger for their generosity and insights as senior editors and to Mark Colwell and Mission Telecom Giving for their support which made this work possible. To learn more about this work or join the Alternative Funding Working Group email info@connecthumanity.fund
This guide proves that closing the digital divide isn’t charity, it’s good business for everyone. It also lays the groundwork for a more resilient future, one where digital adoption funding doesn’t rise and fall with each political cycle. Mission Telecom Giving is honored to stand behind Connect Humanity’s bold vision, and we hope other potential funders see themselves in these pages and start building alongside us.
Ashindi Maxton — Executive Director at Mission Telecom Giving
© 2026 Connect Humanity. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
The Alt-Funding Field Guide is a series produced by Connect Humanity’s Alternative Funding Innovation Lab, with support from Mission Telecom Giving.
Foreword
In 2009, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a National Broadband Plan to ensure every American has “access to broadband capability.” Congress required that this plan include a strategy for achieving affordability and maximizing use of broadband to advance “consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, employee training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth, and other national purposes.”
What Congress understood, and what was at the heart of that Plan, was that full participation in the economy and society was impossible for those individuals, families, and communities who did not have access to a robust broadband network.
The chapters in this guide demonstrate, far more than we could in 2010, how important and correct that Congressional insight was.
As they demonstrate, whether discussing health care, education, housing, workforce development, or a plethora of other topics, access to services and opportunities depend on having access to an affordable broadband network and having the knowledge of how to utilize the many ways broadband now delivers essential services.
In this way, the volume provides a compelling portrait of the costs to those on the wrong side of the digital divide. But there is another side of the coin of the problems that this guide demonstrates. The cost is not just shouldered by those disconnected. The cost is borne by all of us.
Digital disconnection imposes a cost on our economy, shrinking economic growth. As the chapter on workforce development notes, a RAND study of a free digital literacy training program found that within approximately two months of course completion, daily computer use increased from 34% to 62%, and employment nearly tripled, from 14% to 41%. Among employed participants, those earning more than $20,000 rose from 45% to 68%, and the share earning between $40,000 and $60,000 doubled from 15% to 29%. But such courses are not available to all who need them, thus hurting the American economy.
The impact on health care — one of the largest sectors of our economy and largest costs for the federal government — is particularly noteworthy. As the chapter on healthcare notes, “Digital technologies are now central to healthcare delivery. Patient portals, telehealth visits, remote monitoring devices, and electronic messaging increasingly shape how patients access care, communicate with providers, and manage chronic conditions.” The chapter then lays out in extensive detail — details that every member of Congress who claims to be fiscally responsible should understand — how digital care can improve outcomes while also reducing costs.
In short, as this volume conclusively demonstrates, the digital divide results in slower economic growth, increases in the cost of healthcare, education, job training and placement, and other social services, while decreasing the effectiveness of those services.
Moreover, while the cost of digital exclusion is already large and growing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will magnify the cost. There is no doubt that later this decade we will view the implications of AI as similar to how Covid-19 vividly demonstrated the unacceptability of digital exclusion. Whether the topic involves the skill sets needed, the jobs we need to fill, education or health care, trends in artificial intelligence will exacerbate the negative consequences of any remaining digital divide. And those consequences in turn will make the United States less competitive as AI defines the new parameters of competition.
This volume demonstrates something else that was not clear in 2010. Not only do we need the right government policies, we also need efforts to assure that all can effectively use the tools of modern communications and AI. As the health care chapter correctly notes, “The importance of human intermediaries for technology adoption cannot be overstated. Patients value supportive services based on individualized attention, trust, and sustained follow-up.”
The 2010 National Broadband Plan ends by writing that “this plan is in beta and always will be. Like the internet itself, the plan will always be changing — adjusting to new developments in technologies and markets. As such, implementation requires a long-term commitment to measuring progress and adjusting programs and policies to improve performance.”
Connect Humanity has brilliantly clarified how we need to adjust our mindset and how these programs are funded to help all Americans have an opportunity to thrive in the information economy. Moreover, it points to practical and financially rigorous ways that multiple stakeholders can participate in creating those opportunities. It is a huge and welcome contribution to the ongoing, and always in beta, discussion of how we as a country can benefit from the tools of the 21st century.
Blair Levin was the Executive Director of the 2010 US National Broadband Plan. He serves as a senior editor for the Alt Funding Field Guide series.