Published on Mar 31, 2021 on Medium for First Tech Fund
As we’ve seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, not having access to technology and digital information isn’t just a minor inconvenience — it’s literally a matter of life and death.
A sizable portion of seniors don’t have devices to sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations, and the hundreds of thousands of households that lacked internet access at the height of the pandemic were at a disadvantage for financial and food support, education, and essential health and behavioral health services in this time of crisis.
The conclusion here should be clear: Information and digital accessibility need to be recognized as human rights.
So as a result, my friends launched First Tech Fund in the middle of the 2020 pandemic. Since our launch last summer, we’ve provided 52 students from low income and underserved backgrounds with free laptops, WiFi hotspots, dedicated mentorship, and college and career readiness training and workshops. Over 700 students in New York City applied for our fellowship program within a few short weeks, demonstrating the overwhelming need for this support among families across the city.
As a member of the First Tech Fund Young Leaders Council, access to this support is deeply personal for me. My parents fled from their industrial rural communities in Romania as political refugee immigrants in the early 1990s and settled on Staten Island, where I was born and attended public school.
My father initially started working on construction sites in Brooklyn and the Bronx, then began taking classes at the College of Staten Island before getting an office job. He made sure the significance of his journey wasn’t lost on me and prioritized my future, acquiring a spare desktop computer from his job so that I could learn how to use a computer from a very young age.
We set it up next to him at home so we could ‘’work together” as I learned how to install and uninstall programs, connect to a network, and how to type. While I didn’t enjoy it very much at the time, the result was that I was able to type up homework assignments quickly, which allowed me to complete essays faster. At the City College of New York, learning how to express myself through the written word helped me put together resumes and cover letters that helped me land jobs with Major League Baseball, Squarespace, and now Vimeo. All this would not have been possible without the digital access I was lucky enough to have through my formative years.
Many young people are not nearly as fortunate. There is an overwhelming number of families today that are struggling to make ends meet under the pressures of the pandemic. They should not have to choose between putting food on the table and finding the means to provide access to technology for their children.
It’s imperative such access isn’t reduced down to luck, but purposefully constructed as a manner of philosophy — who we are at our core. Why wouldn’t our communities invest in our youth? Why shouldn’t we be ambitious about empowering underserved communities with access to information?
The significance of a lack of digital access also cannot be overstated, or scuttled away, as a problem that only affects low-income families. Over 30% of New York City students still haven’t been able to log on to online classes this year, or have reported difficulties with remote learning. And 30% of seniors in New York City, lacking Internet connections, are still awaiting vaccination because they have been unable to register for appointments.
Internet access represents a portal to education for youth and a means to inoculation for the elderly and medically vulnerable. Political leaders on both sides of the aisle like to paint a picture of an America where everyone has an equal footing, an equal start, and an equal chance at success. A critical step to working towards that ideal of fairness is recognizing the democratization of information as a necessary public utility. It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic to drive this point home, and this isn’t a radical concept. Information is a human right.
As our first cohort of First Tech Fund fellows are getting their college acceptance letters, improving in their remote studies, and plugging into new opportunities through our expansive professional network, we look forward to furthering our commitment to ensuring this right. We hope you will join us!
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