Fort Valley State University

The Communi-versity: Piloting an Ecosystem for Digital Equity project activities fall into three categories: (1) A backbone that underlies and enriches all the other project activities; (2) Building awareness, engagement, and skills for on and off-campus users; and (3) Extending broadband connectivity and access. For category one, the backbone activities include convening a Communi-versity advisory board that will be responsible for decision-making process on a range of resource allocations, creation of surveys and other tools, purchase or license of digital services to prepare to train and support users, acquire collaborative tools to develop cloud skills for FVSU students, and develop and deploy a broadband engagement campaign. Category two activities will be related to engagement programs to connect anchor communities, provide training experiences, creation of a training curriculum, and recruit and train TechNavigators to help campus and anchor community participants increase their use of broadband, improve their digital skills, and overcome barriers to adoption on and off campus. Finally, category three activities will expand broadband connectivity and access by providing laptops, hotspots, and cell boosters and establishing satellite-supported broadband hubs across anchor community. Using partnership with Headstart, Extension, and other local entities, Communi-versity will use several local broadband hubs across the community as local touchpoints for training, each staffed with a local team of TechNavigators.