We use these acronyms so often. We just forget what they mean. Yes, a lot of those funds have been retracted and cut and whatnot, and I and I know that staff over at IMLS has been greatly reduced, and including some friends of mine that were over there. So it's it that funding used to support a lot of the technology initiatives, including just the broadband subscriptions of libraries in many, many places. And I know that several libraries that we are connected to through grantee organizations that we worked with on the Appalachia digital accelerator program have been hit with that and are really concerned about being able to continue to be a community touch point for connectivity and digital navigation. And so this is really impacting the digital equity space. Very, very broadly. It's kind of hitting us in all the places that you know, all of the places that we would find stability are being undermined in this field. So I say that not to depress everyone, although it is very depressing, it is not the first time that we've been here, although it might be a little worse than the last time, and my colleagues will eye roll as I say, my tagline phrase is back after B top. So some of you might have remember, might remember the last time the federal government made a major investment in digital equity and connectivity, and that was the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, also that was under NTIA. This was around 2007 to about 2013 broadly gave, you know the up until bead it was the historically largest investment in technology support. And so we did that supported adoption programs, middle mile networks, anchor institution connectivity was quite a large program then as well, although not as big as bead that also had us in a place where we created quite a lot of jobs. We key programs, organizations, supports within our community to support community adoption and meaningful use of broadband technologies. It was the the first time that there was a major federal investment in that and at the end of that program, I ran the, the second largest adoption program in the country. At the time, it was called Connect your community, if you have ever heard of it, if there are any b top folks on the on the call, we had over 100 staff members. We had 75 community partners, 15 lead agencies across five states and in 2013 all of the funding ended. There was no sustainability strategy. And I use the gut number. This is not an ACA, like an official number. About 80% of the digital equity workforce from that period of time evaporated within the year between 2012 and 2013 and so I remember that I lost my job, and I was amongst those shown the unemployment line. So, I mean, this is a very real thing. And you know, this is coming on the heels of something that everyone was celebrating as this great victory and this great impact and win. Communities, and that's what we did to the people that were responsible for helping those those create those impacts. So when we lost DEA, and we have found the same thing, this feels very much like a deja vu moment. And so earlier in the year, I grabbed a bunch of of my my colleagues and friends, many of which who have been through this with me in the past, and others and my colleagues you know at connecting me and we're like, what are we going to do? And we need to think of things. How do we make digital opportunity, equity, inclusion, whatever word you want to use for it. How do we create programming that is sustainable and contextualized within the community frameworks? And so this was something that we worked on to start building a conversation. So both of these blog articles talk speak to this in 2013 I started a project that ended and concluded in 2019 so it took a while to like both, pitch the ideas, you know, get it, you know, create the partnerships, and then the deliverable, which we worked with a county at the time. And to what we figured is there's a huge overlap between social service recipients and the digital divide, right? Those that lacked connectivity were also mostly low income, you know, people that didn't have the means to buy a computer or afford a subscription at that time. And so seeing that overlap, we decided, how can we contextualize within the administration of social service delivery? This is just an example. Ultimately, the long story short, and if you are interested in reading a long, 80 page, exhaustive report on it, I have a link for you and happy to share it. But the long and short was, is, if you could put $2 million into a seed fund and train over 1000 people a year to take of an average of six transactions, I say transactions like interactions with Social Service Administration officials, like a case worker, Whatever people on average, have six per year. If you could take two of those six, transfer them to online, you would return $24 million in cost avoidance and return on investment through a through gain deficiency within a two year span. Very, very staggering numbers, plus you would have all these ancillary benefits that would drive down people's duration of time in which they would rely on these social services, because they would be more employable, you know, improving health outcomes, all of these myriad of additional things. So it's an interesting concept. In 2019, we put this before County Council. This is Cuyahoga County, where I live, and Cuyahoga County what agreed to invest in this model. Unfortunately, a few months later, before we stood the program up, covid happened, everything kind of was diverted, and we were then, you know, both into emergency. Just keep, keep the lights on, keep people fed. And then we were focused on bead and DEA, with the infrastructure act following pretty shortly after that, well, ARPA, and then, and then this. So we started getting distracted again by federal funds. So we never fully came together and figured out how to solve the problem the end. The bottom line here is that if we continue to focus our the structure of our programs and our community strategies around technology use on federal funds, it will forever be this off and on again. You know, thing that fails to build momentum and long term sustainability? So it's difficult problem, right? Because in order to do it differently, changing the way, for instance, social services administered, creating those systems and processes that cut across silos, cut across partnerships. Is hard, right? There's tons of stakeholders that need to be involved, agreed to all of this work needs to happen in order to get to a place where it becomes truly sustainable and self fulfilling. So this is the problem. This is the problem. This is the carrot that we're trying to follow. And so we have created, we being connect humanity has stood up a working group. We call it very simply, the alternative funding working group. It is a group of people that from all over the country. We have people. People that are in several, several different states, rural, urban, everything in between that has all everyone has been grappling with this problem and this challenge. Everyone says, Yep, we got to fix this, right. Otherwise, we're just going to continue to find ourselves here. And so we're looking to find, are there sustainable models in communities? First of all, like, do we, we believe that this probably exists somewhere, right? There are probably examples of people that have figured this out somewhere. Let's find them. Let's learn about those models. Can they be replicated? Can they be scaled, right, if they haven't been created? And that's another real possibility, because this group is, we're about 35 you know, large and pretty far reaching national, you know, leadership level, constituents,