At Bread for the City, we provide people in need with life-critical stuff — like food, clothing, medicine, stern letters from our lawyers to landlords — but a lot of what we do is helping people by exchange of information. Things like healthy low-cost recipes,the forms you need to apply for the DC Healthcare Alliance, where to sign up for housing wait lists — information that can positively change the quality of our clients’ lives. Much of this information is (or could be) accessible without a trip to our facility, through the internet.

But just as in health and housing and other qualities of life, there are vast disparities of access to the internet in our city. The New York Times recently published an op-ed about “the new Digital Divide,” which cited statistics suggesting that only 40% of low-income households have access to the internet at home, and that these disparities are especially pronounced among African-American and Latino populations. Indeed, in the communities served by our Southeast Center, high-speed internet adoption rates have been estimated at levels as low as 15%.

That is why we are very excited about a new initiative called the DC Community Access Network (DC-CAN).

The DC-CAN network was built by the DC Government, and funded by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program in President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — stimulus money that was made available for the specific purpose of bridging the digital divide.

At a press conference last week, Mayor Gray introduced DC-CAN as the fastest fiber-optic network in the country — and the accompanying press described it as a one-of-a-kind 21st Century municipal internet infrastructure.

But DC-CAN can’t bridge the digital divide in and of itself. It is a “middle mile” network — in other words, a large source of internet bandwidth that can’t be accessed by individual DC residents. Instead, it must be delivered over the “last mile” into people’s homes by third party organizations.

In coverage of the DC-CAN press conference on We Love DC, Tom Bridge notes that “it’s not very clear yet” what kind of effect this will have on communities where internet is truly scarce.

Well, we have already seen the effect of DC-CAN here in our own facility. Bread for the City was the first “community anchor institution” to “plug in” to DC-CAN. We won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that DC-CAN is a big win for us. As an organization with 75 staff, two facilities, and a medical clinic transmitting lots of secure data, our internet costs before DC-CAN were painfully high — and still our service was insufficient. With DC-CAN, we are saving a considerable amount of money even while getting much faster and more reliable internet than before. DC-CAN makes our IT guy, Andre, very happy.

But though our work here at Bread for the City is now that much easier, this is not quite what a bridge across the digital divide looks like. It’s our clients who need access to this 21st century infrastructure, and it’s going to take extra steps to get it to them.

In this regard, DC-CAN does represent a tremendous opportunity — but it will require a lot of work on behalf of the government, our fellow non-profit organizations, and the community at large to make it happen.

Here at Bread for the City, we’re already taking some steps in that direction. Tune in tomorrow to learn more about them.

Do you work with a non-profit organization that might qualify as a “community anchor institution” and benefit from DC-CAN? We are happy to share what we’ve learned about this network, and help others take this great step forward. First thing to do would be to fill out this survey about your organization’s internet usage and needs. Let’s be in touch so that we can learn from each other.