Every Bob Needs a Kami — Filling the Digital Navigator Void

Hotspot is a series of articles drawn from interviews with people across the digital equity and inclusion ecosystem. For this issue, Cassie Bair sat down with Kami Griffiths, founding Executive Director of digitalLIFT, a nonprofit that trains digital navigators and their managers inside digital equity organizations across California, Texas, and beyond.

A Friday Morning Call

Bob is 75 years old. He has three part-time jobs. Every one of them requires spreadsheets, email, and online forms. Not a digital native, he still manages to work with technology — most of the time.

One Friday morning, he opened the Chrome browser he uses to check his Gmail for one of his jobs. Suddenly boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, there are all these pop-ups, and they're freaking him out, because they're saying “Virus. Virus. Virus!” He'd close one and another would appear. It was whack-a-mole on his screen, and nothing he did made them stop. He was convinced something had gone terribly wrong with his computer.

His usual fix for computer trouble is to call a repair tech who requires cash. That’s money Bob didn't have — unless he called his landlord to ask him to hold off cashing his rent check.

Instead, Bob called Kami Griffiths.

Griffiths is the Founding Executive Director of digitalLIFT, a nonprofit that has spent nearly two decades teaching digital skills to people who never got the chance to learn them — older adults, non-English speakers, people with limited income. She and Bob have known each other since around 2007 and they talk most Fridays. There is, she says, always something.

Bob is lucky. He has Kami. The people who don't have a Kami — and there are millions of them — are on their own.

The Problem Is Bigger Than It Looks

Bob’s story is easy to laugh at a little. A software company's pop-up, a man nearly stopping his rent check, him reaching out for help because he’s in a panic. But pull back, and the picture is serious.

Bob is not an edge case. His experiences are similar to a very large number of people — older adults, non-English speakers, people with limited income, people who came to digital tools late in life and without support. The common thread isn't a lack of intelligence or ambition. It's the lack of community support and someone like Kami.

As Griffiths put it, "Think about if you have a car, but you don't know how to drive it. It has a lot of potential to improve parts of your life, to expand your life. But if you never get driver training, you'll either not drive it at all, or you'll drive it poorly and dangerously, or you'll drive it so slowly that you won't get very far."

Griffiths uses the car analogy to think about the internet. If you don’t have any digital skills training you're just simply not taking advantage of what it has available to you. 

How digitalLIFT Would Solve It: 10,000 Navigators

Griffiths has a clear vision for what it would take to change this picture at scale — and it starts with people, not platforms.

She would develop a robust system to recruit, train, and support volunteer digital navigators, and make that model — and the training for trainers, and the entire system — available for free to service learning programs, to youth-serving organizations, to any community organization interested in offering a digital skills program.

The number she has in mind is 10,000 trained navigators, over three to five years. Not just trained and deployed, but connected to each other, sharing what's working, troubleshooting together, building the kind of institutional knowledge that digitalLIFT's own team has accumulated over nearly two decades.

This isn't a concept in search of a model. The model exists. DigitalLIFT has been running versions of it in California and Texas. The recruitment process, the training curriculum (available in multiple languages), the intake and enrollment systems, the pre- and post-surveys, the evaluation framework — all of it has been built and tested.

What it would take to do it at a national scale is money. Multiple millions of dollars and several years.

"Digital inclusion isn't a mystery that needs more research. It's a capacity problem that needs investment."

— Kami Griffiths, Founding Executive Director, digitalLIFT

Why Kami Built This Model

Griffiths didn't come to digital equity work with a plan.

In 2003 she was volunteering for the Parks Department in New York City, helping at a community computer site. Nobody trained her. She arrived unprepared in front of 17 women, having just heard that she was going to show them how to minimize, maximize, and close a window.

In the end, it was fine. Griffiths stuttered a bit out of nervousness and being unprepared — she had never explained that particular thing to a group of people before. But, she didn't feel like she was helping as much as she could have if she’d had training.

That experience stayed with her — not the discomfort of being unprepared, but the recognition of what that unpreparedness could do to the person on the other side of it.

Without proper training a well—intended person might, as Griffiths put it, "…use too much jargon, talk too quickly, or grab the mouse. You leave the learner feeling very inadequate. There’s an internal voice that we all have that says to some people: you're too old, you're too dumb, just give up now. We don't want to see our trainers putting a learner in a position where they want to give up."

A few months later the Parks Department hired her, and she found something that confirmed everything she'd felt in that room: there was no plan. No curriculum, no structure, no sequence for what learners were supposed to learn or how. She built one. It was used across all the centers.

"I felt very passionate that there needed to be structure. That you're building these learners towards something, and in the end they have gained important skills"
 - Kami Griffiths, Founding Executive Director, digitalLIFT

A Return to Digital Skills Training

By 2006, Griffiths had moved to San Francisco and joined TechSoup, doing capacity-building work. One specific project, CTN Bay Area, was her passion. It was a regional collaborative that provided training and toolkits to nonprofit agencies throughout the region.

The people at TechSoup mentioned they were looking for another organization to take this on, so Griffiths joined a steering committee to determine if this was something that they should continue doing.

In December of 2007 they decided to launch it as a non-profit. Started as Community Technology Network of the Bay Area, they got their 501(c)(3) designation in 2008. Today the organization is called digitalLIFT, and it operates in California and Texas.

A Better Way to Build Digital Inclusion

DigitalLIFT offers a range of training services. They provide training and materials in multiple languages. They work with partners to deliver classes on-site at our partner locations. And, they help with outreach and registration, because some partners can't do that themselves. Critically, they also train the managers and trainers too, not just the learners.

Griffiths especially loves helping organizations build the capacity to do this work themselves. She believes digital equity organizations should, 100% of the time, have internal people — or at least one person — learn how to integrate digital inclusion into their programming, particularly if a nonprofit already has staff who are good at public speaking, good at communicating, and have the kind of personality that people enjoy being around.

"I've been doing this since 2008. I have someone on my team who's been here for nine years, another who's going on seven. All of that collective knowledge is gold, and we want to share it with the wider community."
 — Kami Griffiths, Founding Executive Director, digitalLIFT

One Size Does Not Fit All

One of the things Griffiths is most direct about is something the digital inclusion field sometimes gets wrong: the assumption that a single curriculum, a single approach, or a single program design can serve everyone.

A participant in a workforce development program and a participant at a senior center are not the same learner. Their needs are different, their goals are different, and the technology barriers they face are different. A curriculum designed for one will not serve the other.

More importantly, some learners are dealing with conditions that make absorbing any curriculum nearly impossible. Griffiths uses the term bandwidth tax to describe it — the cognitive and emotional weight of navigating serious instability, whether that's housing, income, or safety. If you're so overwhelmed by where you're going to sleep that night, how you're going to pay your rent next month — how could you possibly learn Microsoft Word?

Start with Community Need

She's also seen the way well-intentioned program requirements can miss the mark entirely. One funder required learners to attend eight hours of instruction to receive a device. For some learners, that's a reasonable condition. For others — people with unpredictable schedules, caregiving responsibilities, or lives that don't allow for an eight-hour commitment — it's a wall. Some people already have all the skills they need and don't have eight hours to spare, but they still really need the device.

"Always start with the need of the community and create a plan to solve their problems with a technology solution."
 — Kami Griffiths, Founding Executive Director, digitalLIFT

The Communities Still Being Left Behind

Two populations, Griffiths says, remain consistently underserved: people who don't speak English as a primary language, and people with low incomes.

For non-English speakers — particularly older adults, who make up a significant portion of digitalLIFT's learners in the San Francisco Bay Area — language isn't a peripheral issue. It's the whole thing. Half of the older adults digitalLIFT serves in San Francisco don't speak English.

DigitalLIFT has modeled a lower-cost approach that some partners have adopted: a bilingual trainer on a large screen, piped in remotely, with in-person assistants from the partner organization circulating to answer questions as learners get stuck. It works. It requires intentionality and some investment, but it's doable.

For low-income individuals, the barrier is more structural. Income is the biggest barrier for people getting online. They just can't afford the ongoing cost. The solutions here require advocacy as much as programming — pushing internet service providers to genuinely publicize and deliver on low-cost options, not just offer them on paper. If they do have a low-cost option, they should publicize it. To help meet this need, 35 Mile Foundation works with organizations offering low cost service and equipment across the U.S.

These populations aren't unreachable. They're underserved by programs designed without them in mind.

The Stakes Continue to Rise

The urgency behind this work has increased significantly in a short period of time. Government services that people with the least digital fluency depend on most are moving online fast.

Social Security payments are no longer mailed — recipients need online accounts. Paper checks stopped being issued on September 30, 2025, with payments moving to electronic methods instead, though some limited exceptions and waivers may still apply for people who qualify. Medicare renewals are now required twice a year and must be managed digitally. Telehealth is expanding rapidly in rural areas, but accessing it requires both a device and the skills to use it. And not all of these places have internet — let alone affordable internet.

"How do you do telehealth if you don't have internet?" Griffiths asks — and then extends the question further: how do you do telehealth if you have the internet but don't know how to navigate a portal?

Access Without Skills Has Its Own Dangers

And then there's the other edge of the risk. Without digital literacy, the internet is not just inaccessible — it's dangerous. People click on things they shouldn't. They enter information they should protect. They could be giving away passwords or Social Security numbers, leaving themselves wide open to fraud and identity theft.

Digital literacy is the antidote to this problem.

What It Would Take to Scale

At 35 Mile Foundation, we find this framing clarifying. The digital divide is often discussed as a technology problem or a policy problem. Griffiths makes the case, through two decades of direct experience, that it is a public safety problem. People are losing savings. People are cut off from healthcare. People are making decisions based on information they can't evaluate. Those are not inconveniences. The investment required to address them at scale is large — and so is the cost of not making it.

Every Community Needs a Kami

 It turns out that Bob's computer was fine. The “virus” warnings were antivirus security software embedded in the Chrome browser misfiring. Griffiths was able to Google how to go into the Chrome browser settings and turn off notifications. The pop-ups are gone. His rent check cleared. He'll probably call Griffiths next Friday with something new.

And she’ll pick up. Because she loves to help.

What Bob has — a trusted, knowledgeable person who will take his call, find the answer if she doesn't already know it, and model the behavior of someone who knows how to figure things out — millions of people don't have.The older adult who doesn't speak English. The person who isn't sure it's safe to leave the apartment. The low-income worker who can't afford eight hours away from the job to sit through a required training.

Every one of them is navigating a world that is moving online faster than the systems built to help them.

The goal is not to clone Kami Griffiths. It's to train 10,000 of the next best thing — connected, supported digital navigators, woven so deeply into how communities function that no one has to get lucky just to find one. The math is solvable. The model exists. What's missing is the will to build it nationally — everywhere people like Bob already live.

Because somewhere in the US right now, someone is staring at a screen full of warnings that aren't real, terrified of a threat that isn't there, about to make a call they can't afford — when what they really need is the right person on the other end of the line.

Every Bob needs a Kami. Until every community has one, or more, the digital equity sector's work remains unfinished.

DigitalLIFT operates in California and Texas, with partners across the country. Learn more at digitallift.org.