Since its founding earlier this year, the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition (BDEC) has been working to address the digital divide in Baltimore and provide resources for citizens who are at risk of being left behind.
More than 50 organizations are helping the Coalition address four focus areas: device access, internet access, digital skills training support, and advocacy. Fearless is proud to be part of the Coalition and is closely supporting efforts involving device access and digital skills training support in particular.
“BDEC is looking at bridging the digital divide and working to make tech accessible to those it’s not currently accessible to. The United Nations declared that internet access is a basic human right at this point,” said Fearless Community Manager Meghan Butler. “Given that coupled with the COVID-19 crisis causing schooling and many services to move online-only, Fearless is eager to get on board to make sure there is no eternal loss of access to education, especially for our already under-resourced and underserved populations.”
To support the Coalition’s goals of collecting 2,000 devices for those in need over the next two months, Fearless helped set up an Air Table solution to track device donation pledges, individual requests, and the status of donated equipment. About 70 devices have already been pledged after an initial soft launch of the campaign.
Our support of BDEC aligns with our Core Belief that People Matter. We understand that privilege and justice aren’t equally distributed and we want to support the pipelines that help people grow and learn and provide a strong foundation to stand on.
“Fearless is providing the technical expertise to make processes more efficient, enabling the device donation and distribution effort to scale up more quickly. We’ve developed an automated system that ensures people who are donating devices have the right information which allows the Devices Team volunteers to focus on distributing the computers that have been donated,” Butler said. “We are here to serve as a resource to these important BDEC efforts.”
We are also involved with the Digital Skills Training & Technical Support team’s efforts to create a Help Desk for adult learners participating in local education and workforce development programs. BDEC formed a partnership with United Way of Central Maryland to help with oversight of the Help Desk, which will be going live later this summer. The goal of the Help Desk is to give adult learners a place to ask their technical questions — anything from how to send an email or use a web conferencing service to troubleshooting more complex hardware or software issues.
Fearless helped lead the charge to hire the Help Desk Coordinator, lending their expertise running a Help Desk for SBA’s Certify platform.
The Help Desk will be staffed by a Coordinator, who will work with United Way, and two Technicians from a local tech training program. The goal is to additionally expand their efforts by engaging volunteers from the Baltimore tech community to act as additional Help Desk support. If you know a tech professional who’d like to help they can sign up here
Get in touch with the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition team to get involved.
