Wilson’s organization helped create Black Churches 4 Digital Equity to build that potential among Black clergy. The group brings pastors together with FCC and state broadband officials while also holding events where community members are invited to sign up for the ACP. After launching “ACP Days of Action” last year, the initiative’s partners have held similar events this summer across a dozen and a half mostly Southern states and the District of Columbia.
Wilson said: “Our churches just see it as a way to, number one, reduce the cost of internet because it is really expensive but also a way to get devices into the hands of their community members.” Anyone who has a Pell grant or receives benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can get a $30 subsidy toward an internet bill and $100 discount for a personal computer.
Pamela Price, deputy director of The Balm in Gilead, a Virginia-based organization that works with Black congregations on health improvement, discovered the severity of the disparity in internet access in the rural South when Balm in Gilead moved to shift its diabetes prevention program from in-person to online shortly after the start of the pandemic. The vast majority of the approximately 600 clients the organization was working with “only had a smartphone and/or a tablet,” usually the only such device in their home.
“We just kind of take for granted that there has to be at least one laptop,” said Price, but many participants’ homes had no computer at all.
A significant majority did not have an internet connection reliable enough to listen to a 60- to 90-minute class. A quarter of them, mostly those in Mississippi and Alabama, were unable to participate because of access issues.
Those findings helped spur Price, who is also a fellow of Black Churches 4 Digital Equity, and The Balm in Gilead to work with congregations in six southeastern states last year to hold events that provided hundreds of families an opportunity to sign up for the Affordable Connectivity Program.
In Canton, Mississippi, which has a population of about 11,000, Balm in Gilead representatives hosted a lunch in September at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where they served fried chicken, broccoli casserole and candied yams and handed out door prizes — as well as about 100 applications.
“Many people there did not have internet,” said Tanya Henderson, a program director for Balm in Gilead who traveled to the event. Most of those attending were senior citizens or parents of school-age children. The money they saved on broadband services, they said, would go for groceries, medicine and other expenses.
“Whole families came by; people were eager to get applications for their other family members as well,” said the Rev. Belinda Johnson, an associate minister of the church who also is a state manager for Balm in Gilead’s diabetes prevention program. “The activity was from 1 to 3. We even had somebody come at 3 o’clock, running in the door, trying to make sure that they got the application.”
In all, more than 230,000 Mississippi households have enrolled in the program.
Some low-cost internet carriers have taken advantage of the program and skirted some of the government’s rules, The Washington Post reported last year. Shady marketing tactics, Johnson said, is one reason people in her area appreciate learning about ACP through a church.
“We are a community church, and we do a lot in the community,” she said of her congregation, which is more than 170 years old. “They trust us, and they know us.”
