How might we close the digital opportunity gap in rural America?
The Center on Rural Innovation
The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a nonprofit dedicated to increasing rural prosperity by closing the digital divide. CORI works with leaders across rural America to build inclusive digital economies that support scalable tech entrepreneurs, create more tech employment, and provide training pathways for rural Americans to access tech skills.
Skills employed
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The first stage of our technical assistance involves a community assessment in which we interview community members who fall into various digital economy archetypes. For this I have developed an interview guide with an interview protocol and question bank based on archetypes.
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Strategy sessions involve bringing communities through a series of ideation activities, in which they are asked to come up with potential solutions to pain points in their digital economies under a variety of circumstances. We challenge participants to ideate both with and without considering resource constraints. These solutions are then refined and synthesized throughout the following workshops.
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Helping communities develop ecosystem building strategies involves a lot of systems thinking, as we must consider how different actors and programs within the system affect each other. Developing ecosystem strategies requires mapping out dependencies, magnifiers of effect, and inhibiting forces —all factors that I bring into my facilitation strategies.
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Throughout both strategy development work and funding assistance program planning work, I lead communities through rapid journey mapping for their end users and target audiences. I use this to help communities identify touch points in their ecosystem, what is accessible, whether or not parts of their service pathways are connected, and what the experience would ultimately feel like to a user/participant.
Rural Innovation Initiative
In helping rural areas increase their numbers of tech workers and homegrown tech startups, we work closely with communities to help them to develop their own inclusive Tech Economy Ecosystems.
I have worked with rural leaders across 12 states in technical assistance ranging from data diagnostics and asset mapping, to facilitating strategy development sessions, and federal grant planning.
