Breaking the Cycle: Developing Digital Equity Funding That Survives Political Winds

Hotspot is a series of articles drawn from interviews with people across the digital equity and inclusion ecosystem. In this issue, Cassie Bair, our VP of Broadband Services sat down with Samantha Schartman, Director of Philanthropic Programs at Connect Humanity to discuss the path forward for the digital equity and inclusion sector.

The Impact of a Political Storm

The digital equity and inclusion sector is at a crossroads. In the wake of the Digital Equity Act funding being clawed back, digital equity professionals across the country are experiencing an unsettling sense of déjà vu. For those who lived through the end of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) about 10 years ago, the parallels are stark — dedicated professionals facing unemployment, leaders announcing layoffs, effective programs shuttered, and a field that we see contracting and losing talent.

Samantha Schartman, Director of Philanthropic Programs at Connect Humanity, knows this story intimately — she lived it the first time. But rather than accepting defeat, she's mobilizing the field around a critical question: How do we build sustainable funding models that survive political winds? 

In our conversation, Schartman shares her journey through digital equity work, the painful lessons of BTOP's collapse, and her work to find a sustainable way forward for digital inclusion. And, we learn why she believes the answer lies not just in doing social good, but in capturing and demonstrating the economic value digital equity and inclusion creates.

Reimagining Digital Access Through Capital Markets

Connect Humanity is a non-profit impact investor sitting at the intersection of access to capital and digital inclusion. They work to see a world in which communities — particularly highly rural or very impoverished communities — have the same robust connectivity choices as their wealthier urban counterparts, along with all of the myriad of social benefits that come with that. To achieve their vision, they open up access to capital products that enable those systems to be within reach.

"Big telcos, they're big businesses that operate for shareholder interests," Schartman explains. "Their business structures and target profit margins don't always work in the most remote or low-income communities. And so we find that they get overlooked and passed by, by the business models that have shaped the telecommunications industry."

Reimagining Capital for Digital Inclusion

The organization's approach challenges traditional telecommunications business models by opening up new capital structures that enable communities and small businesses to provide connectivity themselves. The goal is to create sustainable, profitable, revenue-generating local businesses — even if they don't meet the profit margins that large telecommunications companies expect.

"We think that communities are investable across the board," Schartman says. "We think we need new tools to make that happen. And Connect Humanity is leading the charge to challenge those capital markets and to try to disrupt the way they have traditionally run — and open up more access and tools for communities to ensure their connected futures."

A Personal Journey to Digital Equity

Growing Up with Technology

Schartman identifies as a "Zennial"—part of the last generation to have a fully analog childhood while becoming completely fluent with technology as it evolved around them. Growing up with an Apple II at home, she learned to navigate the internet before Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web made it accessible to everyone, running DOS commands and mastering early digital interfaces.

From Family Tech Support to Industry Bridge-Builder

This early fluency positioned her as a bridge between her family and technology. As the youngest of her immediate family but oldest of her extended family, she became the gateway for exposing most of her relatives to new technologies.

One formative experience came through helping her father — a car dealer who employed over 100 people across two dealerships — navigate the digitization of his business. "I remember my father moving his whole store… from typewriters to computers, and from boxes upon boxes and rooms upon rooms of files of people's car history, their service reports, their titles, all of that stuff, going from paper to digital formats, and helping him translate that. It was really painful. All of the people that worked there didn't know how to use them, and now they were being forced to. "

Academic Foundations in Translation

These early experiences of translating technology for others became an academic and professional focus. An art school student who later pursued cognitive linguistics, Schartman ended up focusing on how human cognition translates through different mediums. And technology kept coming up as a theme. 

The BTOP Era: Building and Losing a Movement

Schartman's introduction to formal digital equity work came through the Connect Your Community program hosted by OneCommunity — a Cleveland nonprofit that had received $19 million in federal stimulus funding under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) during the Obama administration.

As Schartman recalls, it was the first time the federal government really put a lot of money into the concept of digital connectivity.

Creating Impact at Scale

Connect Your Community was a Sustainable Broadband Adoption (SBA) project focused in the Cleveland area. It was a large effort. Schartman's program alone had over 100 employees working as trainers, volunteers, and supervisors across five states, ultimately training 33,000 people.

“And at the end of that project, people felt very proud.” Shartman said, “We all had felt that we had done something impactful. We had changed people's lives. And the thanks we were given for that was basically to be shown the unemployment line.”

The Devastating Aftermath

Despite being called one of the most impactful programs in the country, when funding ended, the workforce that had built this success faced mass unemployment.

"I remember feeling really shell-shocked," Schartman recalls. "Myself included, we were all out of work after all of that. We were called one of the most impactful programs in the country, and the next year, I was looking for work. I was eight months pregnant at the time, and it was really, really hard."

She estimates that approximately 80% of the entire digital equity field nationwide evaporated within a year. "Only those few of us who really had the grit and dedication and good fortune, quite honestly, to find ways forward, or came from organizations that continued to support us were able to continue moving this whole field forward."

Rigorous Research in the Rubble

Rather than simply moving on, Schartman dove into the data she had meticulously collected throughout the program. "When I say we had trained 33,000 people, I know that because I hand-audited every paper file in the program myself. I know that number is right, because I scanned it, tagged it, inventoried things, analyzed it, digitized it."

She then conducted longitudinal studies, checking in with a 400-person sample twice over six years. “I knew that we needed to come up with new ways of looking at this,” she said. “And that federal funding… everybody at the time said there's never going to be another federal bill. It's never going to happen. Well, things take turns, but we didn't expect to get that chance, so we had to find other ways to continue doing the work that we all saw was so important.”

Net Inclusion 2025: History Repeating

When Schartman attended NDIA's Net Inclusion conference in 2025, the parallels to 2013 were impossible to ignore. The Digital Equity Act funding had recently been clawed back, leaving programs that had been promised funding in crisis.

"People were walking around with buttons saying, 'please hire me,' and I'm talking to my friends who were telling me that they're laying off a dozen people at their organization. They don't know how they're gonna make payroll next month," she describes. "It's heart-wrenching when you know how much dedication and care goes into the work."

Assembling a Working Group

The sense of déjà vu sparked action. In conversations with colleagues who had lived through the BTOP era, Schartman found universal agreement: they needed to think differently about funding. "I said, 'Well guys, let's think about it together, right? We started this together, let's finish this together. Let's at least brainstorm and help each other. We all want the same thing.'"

Schartman’s Alternative Funding Models Working Group began with about half a dozen veterans of the field — people she had known for 15+ years, prominent leaders with distinction in digital equity work.

Exploring Diverse Funding Mechanisms

Their brainstorming has been comprehensive, exploring everything from donor-advised funds to microtax opportunities, from making digital equity a voting issue at local levels to building better public-private partnerships that capture the economic value created by digital equity programs.

"The longer I have the conversations, the more and more people are showing up in my inbox, in my LinkedIn feeds, and through word of mouth. More people are showing up to the monthly meeting that we have," Schartman says. "And the conversations are getting deeper and deeper, and we’re looking forward to launching a project here soon."

Building a Sustainable Future — Together

The digital equity and inclusion field stands at a crossroads remarkably similar to the one it faced when BTOP ended. The recent loss of federal funding has once again thrown dedicated professionals and proven programs into uncertainty. But this time, there's a crucial difference: institutional memory.

Leaders like Samantha Schartman remember what it took to get through the last disruption, and they're determined not to repeat the same patterns. The Alternative Funding Models Working Group represents more than just a search for new money sources — it's a fundamental rethinking of how digital equity work sustains itself.

By focusing on capturing the economic value these programs create, rather than relying solely on social good arguments, the field may finally build funding mechanisms that survive political tides and budget cycles.

The question now isn't whether digital equity work creates value — the data shows it. The question is whether the field can organize itself to claim that value, build sustainable models around it, and ensure that the next time federal funding evaporates, the infrastructure that supports digital inclusion work remains standing.

For Schartman and the other participants in the Alternative Funding Models Working Group, the answer must be yes. Too many lives have been changed, too much dedication has been poured into this work, and the need in communities is too great to let history repeat itself. 

The challenge is daunting, but so is the opportunity. By rethinking capital, reframing digital equity and inclusion as both a social and economic good, and uniting leaders across the sector, we can chart a path forward that ensures communities are not left behind.

By working together, the digital equity field can build a more resilient and sustainable future, ensuring that the critical work of creating access for communities and bridging the digital divide continues — no matter what direction political winds may blow.