Community Engagement.

E2D (“Eliminate the Digital Divide”) is a non-profit agency that was founded due to two simple questions that an enlightened 12 year-old girl asked her parents in October 2012:

• How can all kids in our school do their homework and projects successfully if some of their families are too poor to own digital technology?

• What are we doing to do about it?

This young girl, Franny Millen, decided that the digital divide between those who have computers at home and those who do not was a social inequity…and one that she resolved to try to fix.

Since then, a broad-based coalition of municipal leaders, college students, corporate supporters and hundreds of civic volunteers in the Charlotte Region have come together to study the pervasiveness of digital exclusion and to create solutions one family at a time.  

Beginning in just 2013, E2D has worked successfully with 118 schools within the Charlotte Mecklenburg School (CMS) system.  As of July 2016 over 1,200 families have bridged the digital divide using laptops, digital access and computer training provided by E2D.

Children who were spiraling downward as just “the next generation of multi-generational poverty” have begun to use their new computers to vault quickly upward back to where the larger student body is thriving.  Early test metrics are supporting the fact that E2D students are experiencing to-date strong growth in their math and language aptitude tests.

The National League of Cities, Next Century Cities and Google Fiber recognized E2D as “The Most Innovative Digital Inclusion” program in the US at their annual conference in 2015. E2D has received several other awards and recognition for its work including receiving the Blue Diamond Award for Non-Profit Technology from IT-ology and most recently was named one of the “Top 30 Technologists, Transformers and Trailblazers” by The Center for Digital Education.

 As satisfying as it is to say that E2D has closed the digital gap for over 1,800 families, E2D knows that the solutions required to provide the essential home-based digital tools for ALL remaining students in Charlotte totals at least another 24,000 student homes.  

E2D is committed to working with community partners to build and scale the most effective organization that can equip all remaining students with the educational tools that will make them successful in the classroom and prosper, ultimately, throughout the rest of their lives.

At E2D we believe it is really important that all students can do all the work that teachers assign.

-Franny Millen