Something New Is Always Coming at Us: Angela Siefer on Digital Inclusion in 2026

Hotspot is a series of articles drawn from interviews with people across the digital equity and inclusion ecosystem. For this issue, 35 Mile Foundation's Cassie Bair spoke with Angela Siefer, Executive Director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), about Digital Inclusion Week, the origin of NDIA, and where the digital equity field stands heading into 2027. Note: Cassie is a member of the NDIA Board of Directors.

A Week That Almost Didn't Happen

Digital Inclusion Week 2026 runs October 4 - 10 under the theme "Sustain, Empower, Evolve: Building a Brighter Digital Future." It's a week when organizations across the country, libraries, nonprofits, housing authorities, local governments, and more raise awareness about their digital inclusion work through skills trainings, device distributions, and community events.

It's also a week that almost didn't happen. About ten or eleven years ago, someone suggested making it a day. Siefer wasn't sold. "I was like, I don't know, we don't have time for that. If you want to do it, it's fine," she recalled. "And I was completely wrong. It turned out to be a really important idea, so important we moved from a day to a week."

Today, NDIA provides a platform where participating organizations can share what they're doing. "We try to make it as locally based and locally owned as we can," Siefer said, "and we 

are the place where folks can share what they are doing and take ideas from each other, but then also lift each other up."

Why Visibility Matters Right Now

The digital equity field has had a difficult year. The Digital Equity Act was terminated last year and the fallout from that continues. Pandemic-era ARPA funds that sustained local government digital inclusion efforts have largely wrapped up. And some funders have retreated from anything carrying DEI-adjacent language.

When budgets tighten, Siefer says, the work that often gets cut first is awareness-building — the outreach that generates future support. "Having somebody who is dedicated to talking to the media, and generating stories, and bringing in elected officials or other champions into the work is something that sometimes gets cut," she said.

"How do you balance providing services to those that need the services, but also continuing to build the awareness so that you can raise funds to continue providing the services? That's a really challenging trade-off."

It's one reason she's encouraged by coalitions forming across the country — organizations pooling limited resources to build that awareness together. And it's what makes gatherings like Digital Inclusion Week and NDIA's annual Net Inclusion conference so important. 

Net Inclusion 2027 takes place February 24–26 in Columbus, Ohio, and Siefer describes it as the place where practitioners "can connect to each other and feel supported that the digital equity field is not a bunch of disjointed organizations, but it's organizations who support each other and help each other move forward."

How NDIA Came to Be

NDIA started eleven years ago. Siefer and others working in what was then called broadband adoption or community technology centers, recognized that community-based digital inclusion programs across the country were invisible to federal policymakers. The Lifeline subsidy ($9.25 for phone service for low-income households) was being modernized to include broadband, and the people running local programs had expertise that Washington wasn't using.

"Federal policymakers should not only know of these organizations but should take advantage of their expertise and their knowledge on the ground working with low-income communities around their communication needs," Siefer said.

Siefer quickly put a network together. "I recognized that I just knew lots of people and if somebody was gonna pull it together, it might as well be me," she said. She had no background in policy, but people around her taught her. "They were like, yes, you should do this, this is important, and we'll teach you how."

What began as a policy effort became something bigger — a peer network where practitioners from different sectors could learn from each other. "If you're working in a library, and you've been running a Digital Navigator program, and then you encounter a community-based organization that has a close tie with a health system, and they're working on a Digital Navigator program, you have different learnings that you can share with each other, because you're doing similar work, but you tend to run in different circles."

What NDIA Is Working on Now

Among the policy issues on NDIA's radar, the Universal Service Fund (USF) is one of the biggest. The USF is the federal mechanism that funds programs like Lifeline and E-Rate, which provide affordable connectivity for low-income households, schools, and libraries. The FCC proposed a major overhaul of USF administration in July 2026, reviewing everything from audit processes to governance structure. Siefer calls it a slow process: "It's going to take forever, but it will be modernized."

NDIA has also invested heavily in data collection. Their aggregator tool helps local organizations gather and share impact data — evidence Siefer sees as essential to the field's long-term survival. "The sustainability of the field is dependent upon having good impact data about what's happening in local communities, and then being able to make larger statements," she said.

On AI — the hottest topic of today — NDIA is partnering with Data and Society on an AI Civics training that Siefer says the organization is "super jazzed about." She frames AI as the next wave in a pattern the field has seen before. "It's just like the internet and those who thought they weren’t going to use the internet. How did that work out for them?" 

Digital skills training and internet access, she argues, are essential for participation "in a society, not just the economy, where AI is present, whether you like it or not."

Siefer keeps the Digital Equity Act lawsuit on her own plate, separate from the rest of the team. "We really try to keep this separate at this moment in time" she said. "The work of digital equity is so important, we can't let it get stalled or stopped because of a lawsuit or because of a disagreement in political circles around the word equity or the word inclusion."

The People at the Center

At a recent event in Columbus with FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, older adult students from a program at the Central Community House community center, described what they'd learned from their digital navigators. They talked about using spreadsheets, recognizing scams, and feeling safe online. They also voiced frustrations — with the cost of internet service, and with an ISP fixed wireless connection that "just stops."

What stood out to Siefer were the paper packets. Their digital navigator sends them home with printed step-by-step instructions so they can practice at home. "That those paper packets were so important to them was really great for the whole conversation for Commissioner Gomez to hear," Siefer said. 

The two young women who serve as navigators at Central Community House are, in her words, "loved by their students. They could not speak highly enough of those two young women."

But Siefer is candid about who the field still isn't reaching — people who don't live near a program, and people who don't trust the organizations that run them. She thinks about her own mother. "I said to her one day, you know, there probably is somebody at the library who could help you with this. She's like, no, I'm not doing that." That isolation, Siefer says, is a big problem that intersects with digital inclusion.

What's Ahead

Siefer's argument on sustainability is direct: "This rollercoaster that we're on, where sometimes there's money for this work, and sometimes there's not money for this work, has got to stop." Her solution is a more diverse mix of funding — continued federal sources, deeper engagement with national philanthropy, and what she sees as an emerging conversation about whether AI profits should help support digital equity work.

There is also cautious good news. NDIA sued after the current federal administration terminated the Digital Equity Act competitive grant program in May 2025, shortly after awards had been announced. In July 2026, a federal judge ruled that a race-based provision in the law was unconstitutional but severable — meaning the rest of the statute stands. The Department of Commerce has told the court it targets December 2026 to reopen the competitive grant program.

Siefer believes it's coming back. "This is not just an agency saying it's going to happen. This is Department of Justice lawyers saying to a federal court that the Digital Equity Act Competitive Grant Program is coming back." NDIA's lawsuit is paused but not over, and the organization is prepared to scrutinize the Notice of Funding Opportunity when it arrives to ensure it meets congressional intent.

"I'm excited about that, and the potential for the community to be able to utilize funds that were intended for them," she said. "I think we all need some good news and something to look forward to."

If this article compels you to support NDIA, you can do so here.