Every so often, a single story does the work of a hundred white papers. Sean Gonsalves’ recent piece for Community Networks, “A Cap, Gown, and Connection,” is one of those. It’s the story of Belinda Parker-Mendoza, a 45-year-old mother on San Antonio’s East Side who walked onto her college campus for the first time to pick up her cap and gown. She had just earned an Associate’s Degree in Business Administration. She was the first person in her entire family, out of ten siblings, two parents, and a daughter, to earn a college diploma of any kind. Her story is moving on its own terms. It’s also, for those of us who work in connectivity and digital inclusion, an unusually clear illustration of what’s at stake right now as the digital equity-driven doors to opportunity are being closed.
A refurbished Dell and a connection she could afford
Before 2022, Belinda didn’t have a laptop or home Internet. Then, through a digital skills training course offered at her Opportunity Home apartment complex by AmeriCorps VISTA, she received a refurbished Dell. Through the same program, she enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and got home Internet for the first time.
That’s the door. Everything else is what she seized when she walked through it.
Belinda finished her associate’s degree with a 4.0 GPA. She joined three honor societies: Phi Theta Kappa, the National Society of Leadership and Success, and Tri-Alpha, which recognizes first-generation college students. And then she transferred to Palo Alto College and is now working toward a Bachelor’s in Applied Technology in Operations Management, with a 2027 graduation date in sight. Along the way, she has stacked a Business Operations Certificate, an Occupational Skills Award, and an Operations Leadership Certificate.
Then there’s the part that doesn’t show up on a transcript. Belinda’s 42-year-old sister is finishing her high school diploma because she watched Belinda do it first. Her daughter now has an associate’s degree and is working toward a bachelor’s. Her neighbors comment on the change. “Someone told me,” she shares in the article, “‘I remember how sad you used to look walking to your car… and now I see you smiling.’”
The story is impossible to read without admiration. It is also impossible to read without thinking about the millions of people for whom that same door has not simply been closed but removed altogether.
“It’s a support system. Not a luxury. A necessity.”
One of the most quotable lines in the piece comes when Belinda explains what the laptop and the connection actually meant to her: “It goes beyond having a laptop in front of you. It’s a support system. The knowledge of how to use it — that’s not a luxury. It’s a necessity.”
That sentence ought to be the headline for any policy conversation about home connectivity in 2026. Because the framing of broadband as a “nice to have”, a consumer amenity, a discretionary purchase, keeps producing decisions that make less and less sense as the world increasingly assumes that everyone is connected, when in reality 25+ million people in the U.S. alone have no access to broadband connectivity
Telehealth visits, course assignments, job applications, benefits enrollment, school portals, employer training, civic participation – the list of things that now presume a working connection at home is long and growing. There is no parallel universe where those activities migrate back to paper. The direction of travel is one-way.
The funding pullback
So, consider where we actually are.
The Affordable Connectivity Program, which made home Internet affordable for roughly 23 million households at its peak, was allowed to expire in 2024. When the subsidy ended, those households did not suddenly find new room in tight budgets. Many downgraded service. Many lost it altogether. The program that helped Belinda hold on to her connection at the moment that mattered most is no longer there for the next person in her position.
The Digital Equity Act – the federal effort designed to fund precisely the kind of community-based digital skills training, devices, and support programs that gave Belinda her start – was abruptly terminated, in this case via a social media post. Legal challenges to that termination are still working their way through the courts. In the meantime, the “covered populations” the Act was written to serve – veterans, rural communities, seniors, people with disabilities, low-income households, English language learners – are watching the doors to opportunity they were promised disappear.
These are not abstract program lines. They are, very literally, the apparatus that produced Belinda’s story. Take that apparatus apart, and the next Belinda doesn’t get her cap and gown. She doesn’t even get the laptop.
The economics never really were the problem
It’s worth being plain about something the article surfaces but that often gets buried in the noise: the ACP wasn’t expensive in any honest accounting.
The program cost roughly $7.3 billion a year. Independent analyses cited in the article estimate that the telehealth savings alone, driven by remote visits that run about 23 percent cheaper than in-person care, were on the order of $28.9 to $29.5 billion annually. That’s before you count the labor force participation, educational attainment, small business activity, and reduced reliance on other safety-net programs that flow from a connected household.
Ending the ACP didn’t save the federal balance sheet. It just moved the cost off-book and onto households, local governments, schools and clinics, and the people, like Belinda, who are now expected to thread the needle without the program that helped them in the first place.
That’s not fiscal discipline. It’s deferred maintenance on the country’s digital foundation.
AI is about to make this worse, not better
There’s an additional reason this moment matters more than the last one. The next phase of the digital economy isn’t just “more Internet.” It’s AI woven into the substrate of how people learn, search, apply, write, and work. Tools that were optional a few years ago are quickly becoming default expectations in classrooms [ADD LINK TO NEWSLETTER ARTICLE], hiring pipelines, and customer-facing services.
In that environment, the gap between the connected and the disconnected stops growing linearly and starts compounding. People without reliable home connectivity won’t just be a generation behind in tools — they’ll be a generation behind in the literacy required to use them. And the cost of catching up will rise, not fall, as the curve steepens.
Pulling back on connectivity funding at this particular inflection point is the policy equivalent of cutting power to the building right as the lights need to come on.
What the work looks like from here
None of this is a counsel of despair. Belinda’s story is also a story about what local programs, community partners, and committed people can accomplish even when federal winds are unfavorable. AmeriCorps VISTA put a laptop in her hands. A program coordinator invited her to pass out flyers when she was barely leaving her apartment. A digital skills class met her where she was. Those things are still happening, in cities and small towns across the country, supported by libraries, housing organizations, schools, nonprofits, anchor institutions, and ISPs that have made digital inclusion part of their core mission.
The work of closing the divide does not stop because the funding has been cut. It does, however, get harder, slower, and less even, and it concentrates in the hands of organizations and communities that are already doing more with less.
The honest industry conversation, then, is two-sided. On one hand, real admiration for the people doing this work on the ground, and for graduates like Belinda who turn a laptop into a 4.0 and a 4.0 into a transformed family tree. On the other hand, real clarity that the policy environment is making their job materially harder, and that the rollback of programs like the ACP and the Digital Equity Act is not a neutral budget decision. It is a decision to leave Belindas on the wrong side of the divide and close the doors to opportunity.
“It’s never too late.”
The line from Belinda we keep coming back to is the one she now offers to the students she trains, many of whom were as nervous around technology as she once was: “It’s never too late. You don’t have to sprint. You don’t even have to jog. If you can’t walk — crawl. Just start.”
That’s a remarkable thing to hear from someone who, just a few years ago, didn’t own a computer. It’s also a quiet challenge to the rest of us – funders, policymakers, providers, nonprofits, and platforms – to make sure that when someone is ready to start, the door is actually there and unlocked, ready to be opened and stepped through.
Belinda did her part. She did more than her part. The question for the industry, and for the country, is whether we’ll keep building doors to opportunity, or quietly let them disappear because the budget conversation got easier without them.
We think the answer is obvious. We think Belinda’s story makes it obvious. And we think the next chapter — the one with AI, with rural broadband still uneven, with millions of households still navigating the ACP cliff — depends on whether we treat connectivity as the support system she described, or as the luxury it has never actually been.
Read the full piece by Sean Gonsalves at Community Networks: A Cap, Gown, and Connection.
