Join us today, Thursday, October 8, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM ET, for this latest installment of the Building for Digital Equity webinar series — a Digital Inclusion Week 2026 special edition built around a question every practitioner in this field is living right now: with federal support growing less certain, what does it actually take to sustain this work, empower the people building it from the ground up, and evolve to keep reaching the communities who need it most?

Registration is still open here.

It can be viewed on YouTube here.

Image

The hour opens with Sustain, a grounded look at where Digital Equity Act funding actually stands. NDIA Policy Director Amy Huffman will walk through what's landed in states and what's stalled, while NDIA Director of Research & Programs Aaron Schill introduces a new evaluation and data-collection tool — "the aggregator" — built to help coalitions and funders track what's actually working and make the case for continued investment.

From there, the show turns to Empower, a spotlight on Esther Jang and the Seattle Community Network.

Esther will take us back to the earliest days of the pandemic, when Seattle's Tiny House Villages often weren't even recognized as valid addresses by internet providers, let alone served by them. She'll share the story of the November 2020 open call that asked Seattle's tech workers to help "barnraise" a community wireless network fast, and what she learned once an army of eager volunteers actually showed up.