---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Angela Siefer, NDIA (she, her) Date: Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 12:38 PM Dear NDIA Affiliates and Friends, For you to continue and scale as needed, new funding models must be identified. For this to happen, the field of digital inclusion needs the research community! Samantha Schartman and I explain this necessity in a new article published by Broadband Breakfast - https://www.digitalinclusion.org/blog/calltotheresearchcommunity/ Snippet - We are calling on researchers, economists, and data scientists to work with us in exploring questions such as: - What program models currently support long-term sustainability? We need real-world evaluations of which models work, and under what conditions. - How can we measure the economic value created through skill acquisition and adoption at the program or participant level? This might include income gains, employment outcomes, decreased benefit dependency, or cost savings to public and private systems. - What systems-level mechanisms can capture this value and reinvest it back into program funding? Are there ways to build repayment models, shared-benefit agreements, or other tools into the digital inclusion ecosystem? These questions are not just academic. They are central to whether communities will have the capacity to keep helping people access and benefit from technology five, ten, or twenty years from now. ~Angela Angela Siefer Executive Director National Digital Inclusion Alliance [image: mobilePhone] 6145373057 [image: emailAddress] angela@digitalinclusion.org [image: website] www.digitalinclusion.org Join us at Net Inclusion 2026, Feb. 3-5, in Chicago! <https://www.digitalinclusion.org/netinclusion26/> _ -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- -