Philadelphia Digital Justice Coalition

Short Synopsis

The Philadelphia Digital Justice Coalition consists of 25 organizations who are advocating for a robust plan to ensure broadband access across all neighborhoods of the city. Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) began the coalition as a model for engaging grassroots constituencies in media policy, using a unique strategy that combines media production and digital inclusion with civic engagement.

Description/Treatment

In MMP’s Digital Inclusion Campaign, we are utilizing a holistic approach to solve the digital divide by merging three components of the information age: media production, digital inclusion and civic engagement. We believe that, taken together, these three pillars are the centerpeice of a new strategy keyed to the urgencies of communities in a 21st century city.

Media Production: With the support of the Knight Foundation 21st Century News Challenge, MMP has developed a groundbreaking community video workshop that trains community collaborators to produce video newscasts. The project started in the fall of 2007 with Philadelphia’s immigrant communities, and has now expanded to include high school students and low-wage workers in an effort to build capacity in Philadelphia’s most marginalized communities. In the last year MMP has trained over 100 individuals in journalism, audio visual production and basic web skills. Through these trainings, MMP is coordinating the development of a video newscast network that extends across fragmented communities, reaching people traditionally on the other side of the digital divide. 

Digital Inclusion: In conjunction with video production, MMP is working with different partners to connect students with computers, routers and Internet access. This is a key component of our work - while it is vital for individuals to have the skills to tell their stories, it is also necessary for them to have the hardware and Web access to be a part of the information age.

Civic Engagement: With the support of the Media and Democracy Coalition and the Media Justice Fund, MMP is bringing those individuals we train into an advocacy campaign around municipal wi-fi and digital inclusion in Philadelphia. This consists of educating and organizing communities in order to deveop a policy agenda to address the digital divide.  We believe the issues of digital inclusion and broadband deployment are at a critical moment in the region.

Recently, Earthlink, who had been contracted to provide citywide wireless Internet access, sold off its assets to the Network Acquisition Company (NAC). Unfortunately for low-income communities, NAC has refocused the vision of Philly's WiFi initiative as solely an outdoor service. This means that the network will not provide important indoor access for many families in communities that need the Internet the most. Consequently, many of those communities that would have gotten Internet access through the network as initially envisioned are being left aside.

Consequently, MMP started the Philadelphia Digital Inclusion Coalition, which consists of 25 organizations, and is largely comprised of individuals in our radio, video and Web classes. The aim of the coalition is to craft a sensible plan to get Internet access for all Philadelphians in their homes. We believe that a major reason a thoughtful digital inclusion plan has not been produced is the absence of community participation in the process to date, especially by low-income Philadelphians who stand the most to gain from solving the digital divide.

In the past year the coalition has held two community forums on digital inclusion while spearheading a campaign to save Philly WiFi, which has been in jeopardy. We believe this process will both help build a model for engaging grassroots constituencies in media policy and forms the basis for a strategy for combining media production and digital inclusion with civic engagement.