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FY 2002 Budget to Help Close the Digital Divide: Information Technology Access Projects
The revolution in information technology (IT) is rapidly changing Massachusetts workplaces and classrooms, and it is entering more and more households. Much of recent economic and employment growth can be attributed to the IT revolution—especially in Massachusetts. This IT revolution also is redefining what it takes to attain economic self-sufficiency: those without access to technology will not be able to obtain the basic skills needed to get good jobs in today’s digital economy.
Yet recent studies reveal that a "digital divide" in America has emerged along old fault lines: those who lack access to computers and the Internet disproportionately are people with low-incomes and with lower educational levels, and those who are African-American and Hispanic. And Massachusetts’ digital divide rankings among the states remain mediocre.
While the digital divide presents a dim economic future for those on the wrong side of it, it also has serious implications for our economy. Jobs now go unfilled due to a lack of workers with IT skills—both advanced and basic—threatening sustained economic growth in our state’s new economy.
FY 2002 State Budget Initiative
The Massachusetts Community Action Program Directors’ Association (MASSCAP) is proposing a state budget initiative to fund Information Technology (IT) Access and Education Projects at Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and other nonprofit groups in low-income communities across Massachusetts. Currently, no Massachusetts funding exists for efforts of this type. These projects would fill a gap by widening computer and Internet access to those who lack it:
- They will be based in low-income communities geographically dispersed across the state.
- The projects will be tailored to communities they serve and may represent a variety of models, or combinations of them, including: "open access" or drop-in centers such as "cyber cafes" which at minimum offer basic instruction; centers offering access plus ongoing informal individual or group IT instruction and/or formal classes; and computer refurbishing and/or distribution programs. They may also be more comprehensive "digital opportunity centers"—offering career help and on-site links/referrals to ABE, GED, ESL, industry training programs, community colleges, other training, and social services.
- Each project will collaborate with other community-based groups, educational institutions, literacy groups and the private sector, and will conduct outreach efforts to promote participation.
Why Is This IT Access Initiative Important?
"The digital economy and digital society are no longer ‘emerging,’" the U.S. Department of Commerce declared in 2000. "They are here." From 1995 to 1999, while producers of computer and communications hardware, software, and services accounted for less than 10 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), they contributed on average 30 percent of the nation’s real economic growth. "Innovations in information technology—so-called IT—have begun to alter the manner in which we do business and create value, often in ways that were not readily foreseeable even five years ago," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has noted. In fact, some argue that we have a "new economy." If so, some say that Massachusetts is the state that most epitomizes it.
"By 2006, almost half of the U.S. workforce will be employed by industries that are either major producers or intensive users of information technology products and services," the U.S. Deptartment of Commerce has projected. Job growth in the IT-producing sector will increase, but jobs within other sectors increasingly will involve the use of computer technology, which will mean that those holding these jobs will need to have at least basic IT knowledge as well as literacy skills. Basic IT skills have become a key part of the definition of "literacy" in the 21st century.
"A chronic shortage of high-tech workers remains the biggest threat to the Massachusetts Innovation Economy," the 2000 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy reported. "There is concern... that prospects for future growth could be reduced by a shortage of skilled workers," the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has written. "Demographics suggest that the work force will be growing relatively slowly in the future. Thus, it is particularly important that the new entrants into the work force be equipped with the flexible skills needed to fill the technically complex and information-intensive jobs being generated by technological innovation." Yet a MassINC study released in January 2001 reveals that as many as 1.1 million workers, or a third of the Massachusetts labor pool, lack such skills—not advanced skills, but basic and essential ones.
With an income gap that has widened and new jobs that demand higher skills, the poor and unskilled will fall even further behind in Massachusetts’ IT-driven economy. Yet without access and exposure to IT, they are unlikely to acquire IT skills. While more citizens are gaining IT access, and while the Commonwealth has invested in connecting schools to the Internet, it is not enough: the IT access gap persists. And our state now lags behind many others in launching creative initiatives to close it.
The groups that find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide include many of the very people whom Community Action Agencies (CAAs) already serve all across Massachusetts, in a multitude of different programs at over 200 sites. CAAs are in the right place—at the right time—to play a strategic role in helping low-income people achieve self-sufficiency in the digital economy, by widening access to computers and the Internet as well as by providing training, support services, and links to other resources through their extensive community networks. This budget item will assist CAAs and other NPOs in helping to close the digital divide.
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