How We Give — The 35 Mile Grant-Making Philosophy

These are unusual times in digital equity and inclusion. Federal funding cut. Federal, state, and local programs shuttered. Brain drain as many talented and dedicated professionals are forced to seek work elsewhere. And yet the need for this work is more vital than ever.

Modern life demands it — with the rapid increase of AI, the move of health and human services to online-only, data centers arriving in communities with little to no local input, civic participation becoming increasingly digital, and the fact that economic mobility depends on access.

In this environment, funding strategies matter as much as the amount you give.

We've been refining our grant-making approach. We work from a set of principles that have been tested in practice, adjusted over time, and shaped by organizations we've come to know and trust. As an organization dedicated to transparency, we want to share the core elements of our funding strategy.

With the Ecosystem Under Threat, We Fund the Backbone

Not all gaps are programmatic. Sometimes the gap is structural.

We are increasingly approached with requests to help with a multitude of issues, big and small. We feel strongly that protecting and strengthening the digital equity and inclusion ecosystem must begin with investing in the national organizations that form the spine of the entire network — providing the infrastructure, expertise, and coordination that no single community or group could build on its own.

When you look at our most recent grant round, at first glance the grants may seem a little sporadic or unfocused. But through the lens of digital equity, and especially through the lens of access, we see the connections between all of these things.

If the backbone organizations go away, all the smaller organizations that are also struggling will lack resources. They lose the training, the policy expertise, the coordination, and the national presence that they can't build alone. We want to make sure the organizations that everybody else leans on remain standing.

Our most recent funding reflects that commitment:

• Connect Humanity — $25,000
• Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) — $25,000
• National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) — $25,000
• Non-Profit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) — $50,000
• Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) — $25,000
• MediaJustice - $35,000

These are organizations fighting in the courts or fighting for E-rate policy on capitol hill, providing a national policy advocacy infrastructure in the space. Some of them pull together coalitions of community-based organizations, connecting grassroots efforts to national resources. Others are there simply to support smaller groups navigating an increasingly hostile funding environment.

Without sustained grant funding to support these organizations, the field loses the capacity to train local leaders, develop scalable models, advocate for inclusive policy, and connect that grassroots work to national resources. It’s our hope that when federal funding eventually returns to this space, the organizations listed above will be there to ensure that smaller organizations working in local communities have trusted resources to rely on.

Investing in these organizations is one of the most efficient and effective ways to ensure that the work reaches communities nationwide.

How We Think About Grant Sizing

Our average grant is around $25,000. That's intentional.

We've been told by organizations we work with that $25,000 is usually what it takes to ignite real change without creating dependency. We use that as a benchmark. We don't want to give grants that are merely symbolic. We want them to be meaningful.

We also don't want organizations to undersell themselves because they assume our resources are smaller than they are. And we don't want them to assume they need to ask for amounts we can't support. The benchmark helps calibrate those conversations.

We Fund the Gaps Others Leave Behind

Our funding targets vital areas that struggle but funders don't traditionally support. We often look at opportunities and try to judge whether somebody else is unlikely to fund them. And we try to step in and fund some of those things. 

There are other funders — better resourced than we are — focused on other social justice issues. Trying to have an impact in all of them is akin to boiling the ocean. So instead, we focus on where we have a genuine superpower: internet access and digital equity.

There's a reason certain organizations and projects don't get funded. Early-stage work is risky. Politically complicated work makes some funders uncomfortable. Niche programs can be hard to explain to a board. We try not to let those reasons be our reasons. We operate on a gap-filling philosophy — looking at the landscape and asking where the need is and the funding isn't.

 

We Source Grantees Through Relationships

We don't have an open call process. We source potential organizations and projects to fund through our network — practitioners we know, partners we've worked alongside, connections built over time in the digital equity space.

This keeps the process high-trust on both sides. It reduces the burden on resource constrained organizations. And it means we're not evaluating applications in a vacuum. We already have an informed understanding of the organizations and projects under consideration.

 

We Keep the Process as Simple as Possible

Our grant agreements are very simple. We ask for the answers to five questions in our project reports. Grants under $10,000 require no reporting at all. We talk to our grantees, and our relationships are based on our mutual network and trust.

Our grantees have complimented us on how easy we make the process.

Organizations that are already stretched thin shouldn't have to spend weeks navigating paperwork to receive support or report on their stewardship of a grant. We try to keep our overhead requirements on grantees as streamlined as possible to maximize the amount of time spent on the work.

We Give General Operating Support, Even When There’s a Project That Interests Us 

The reason is simple. We recognize that these organizations are trying to resource quite a bit of funding in other areas. If they happen to get funding that is supportive of a particular project, they can move this money elsewhere. We just want to support the organization and the kind of work that they do.

We like to give them as much flexibility in how they apply the funding as possible, so most of the time we issue it as a support grant versus a program grant.

The Full Circle

The money for our grant-making comes directly from our telecommunications work. Any revenue we earn through our telecommunication assets — royalty revenue plus broadband service revenue — stays in the ecosystem as much as possible. It’s a virtuous circle of giving and receiving.

We're not trying to drive up our grants budget by charging more and having those costs be passed on to the people we want to help. We don’t view the end-users being served by our broadband programs as a source of profit. Over the past year, we lowered the price of our internet program with this philosophy in mind.

What We're Still Working On

We try to be honest about where the gaps are in the digital equity sector. For example, one is equipment.

If we can figure out a way to make equipment affordable — or partner with someone who can and couple that with our lines of service — that would be a meaningful evolution of what we're able to offer.

Our superpower is access but our ability to deploy it is hobbled by the availability of affordable equipment.

We Fund Good People Doing Good Things

Behind all of these principles is a simple belief: we give money to good people doing good things. 

That philosophy has been successful.

We have a light touch when it comes to compliance. We avoid trying to control how grants get deployed once they're made. We trust the organizations we fund to know their work better than we do — because they do. And we try to stay out of their way while staying involved enough to be helpful.

In the end, this is how we give.