March 9, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The technology efforts of civil-rights organizations will soon get a lift from a new coalition of grant makers and companies.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, in Washington, and the AOL Foundation, in Dulles, Va., have formed the Digital Opportunity Partnership to help civil-rights organizations make better use of technology in their own work and tackle the problem of unequal access to technology.
The Leadership Conference is an association of more than 180 national civil- and human-rights organizations.
“Many of the constituencies of these organizations are precisely those individuals who fall on the wrong side of the digital divide,” says Brian Komar, the conference’s director of technology programs. “If we accelerate the speed at which these organizations adopt new technology, we will be helping to accelerate the rate at which these constituencies adopt the technology.”
The Digital Opportunity Partnership will sponsor at least one traveling technology consultant — which the partnership calls its “freedom rider of the 21st century” — who will visit civil-rights groups across the country to help them with their technology needs.
Another goal of the partnership is to further develop the resources available at the Leadership Conference’s Web site, civilrights.org. The site provides searchable databases on civil-rights organizations, news, projects, and legislative activity. In coming weeks the conference plans to add a feature that will allow visitors to the site and other organizations to submit material for the databases online.
The partnership also plans to conduct a survey to assess how civil-rights organizations use technology and what they are doing to encourage public policies that promote widespread access to technology.
In addition it will hold forums for civil-rights leaders and information-technology employees and promote efforts to increase technology access among members of minority groups.
Besides the AOL Foundation, the Bell Atlantic Foundation and the I.B.M. Corporation have made financial contributions to the partnership’s activities, and Verio has made an in-kind donation of its Web-site-hosting services.
