At NDIA’s Net Inclusion Conference this month, I hosted a workshop built around a simple premise. If we want to stop the erosion of funding for digital inclusion programs, we need to stop relying almost exclusively on grants. Yes, grants will always matter. But they are rarely sufficient, increasingly constrained, and often unstable. To survive and scale, this work needs a broader base of support.

I travelled to Chicago excited that there were 40 people pre-registered. I was blown away when almost 100 turned up on the day. Clearly the topic has struck a nerve.

Yet, when participants were asked to list the beneficiaries of their work, I was reminded how much of a mindset shift our sector still has to make. Again and again, people struggled to move beyond the direct service user: the older adult taking a digital literacy class, the student receiving a low-cost laptop, the person completing a workforce training program.

Yes, those individuals are why this work exists. But if we only define beneficiaries as the people sitting in front of us, we fundamentally undersell the value digital inclusion creates — and we limit who sees themselves as responsible for sustaining it.

Digital inclusion generates, in economist parlance, ‘positive externalities’ — benefits that extend far beyond the direct participant. When an older adult learns to use a patient portal, the beneficiary is not just that individual, but also the healthcare provider that sees fewer missed appointments, the clinic staff who spend less time on administrative troubleshooting, and the broader health system that can communicate more effectively and improve preventative care.

When a student gains reliable access to a device and broadband, the beneficiary is not only the student. It is also the teacher who can assign work without designing around disconnection, the school district striving to improve graduation rates, and the future employers who depend on a digitally capable workforce.

When someone completes digital workforce training, the benefit does not end with their job placement. Local businesses gain employees with foundational skills. Workforce boards hit their performance metrics. Regional economies strengthen their talent pipelines. Tax bases grow.

Digital inclusion strengthens institutions. It improves system-level outcomes. It reduces friction across healthcare, education, workforce development, public administration, and private industry.

And yet we continue to fund it primarily as though it were a small-scale social service delivered to a discrete population.

This framing has consequences. When we tell the story of digital inclusion solely as a charitable intervention for underserved individuals, we naturally look to philanthropy and limited public grants for support. But when we recognize it as enabling infrastructure — essential to the functioning of multiple sectors — a different set of stakeholders comes into view.

Hospitals rely on digitally connected patients. Schools rely on connected households. Employers rely on digitally fluent workers. Local governments rely on residents who can access online services. Financial institutions rely on customers who can navigate digital platforms. Emergency management agencies rely on residents who receive and understand digital alerts.

These institutions benefit every day from the outcomes digital inclusion practitioners make possible. In most cases, however, they are not co-investing in that work. And we are not positioning them to do so.

If we are serious about diversifying funding streams, we need to shift from asking for support because digital inclusion is “the right thing to do,” to making the case that it is in other institutions’ direct interest to sustain and scale it.

That shift demands that we expand how we conceptualize and measure impact. We need to identify the downstream systems that benefit from our programs and begin tracking outcomes that matter to them — reduced no-show rates, improved academic performance, stronger job retention, lower service delivery costs. We need to build relationships with those institutions as core partners. And we need to translate our impact into the language of operational efficiency, workforce readiness, risk mitigation, and long-term growth.

This work will feel unfamiliar to many of us in a sector accustomed to grant cycles and human-centered narratives. But the alternative is continuing to operate in a funding model that leaves digital inclusion vulnerable to boom and bust grant cycles. 

Digital inclusion is foundational infrastructure for modern civic and economic life. When it works, entire systems function better. When it fails, the costs are absorbed not only by individuals, but by schools, hospitals, employers, and governments.

If we want this field to be sustainable, we have to start telling the full story of who benefits. Our beneficiaries are far more numerous than we tend to admit. And until we start naming them, we will continue to leave both resources and resilience on the table.

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We’re grateful to Mission Telecom Giving for supporting our work to explore alternative financing mechanisms. And to Catherine Crago, Cassie Bair, Kami Griffith, and Casey Sorensen for co-facilitating this workshop.

If you want to get involved, reach me at samantha@connecthumanity.fund.