Closing the digital divide: A commentary by Christopher Worman

An unlikely hero of the COVID-19 pandemic? The parking lot. Sitting in cars by shuttered schools, fast food restaurants, and libraries across America, children without internet at home were able to connect to Wi-Fi to access online classes and continue their schooling.

The crisis demonstrated not only the scale of the digital divide that remains across the United States—more than 120 million Americans still don’t use the internet at broadband speeds—but underlined how critical internet access now is to so many of life’s essentials, including health care, remote work, and, of course, education.

To understand how the COVID-19 crisis affected the work of civil society, the nonprofit technology provider TechSoup surveyed its membership and found that, of the nearly 12,000 organizations that responded, four in five said their services were disrupted because their communities lacked internet access....

Read the full commentary by Christopher Worman, co-founder and chief partnership and strategy officer of Connect Humanity.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/SeventyFour)