There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the SF Tech Council.
But if you know an older adult or someone with disabilities in San Francisco, the odds are decent they’ve benefited from the group’s work.
Since its founding nine years ago, the Tech Council has worked to close the digital divide for such San Franciscans. It has helped get the word out about discounted and free broadband service. It has helped get computers and other devices into the hands of people who couldn’t afford them otherwise. And it has helped to get older people and those with disabilities trained on how to do things such as using health-care providers’ apps to make appointments.
Most of all, though, the organization serves as a research and networking hub, a place where representatives of city government agencies, local nonprofits and corporations can come together and learn about how they each are trying to address the digital divide and potentially collaborate.
The Tech Council “is a really awesome agency that helps bring different groups together,” said Kami Griffiths, the executive director and co-founder of Community Tech Network, which offers courses and tutoring to help people use the internet and online services.
“They kind of are the connective tissues between the corporate partners, the government partners, the nonprofit partners, and San Francisco is just really lucky to have an entity like that,” she said.
The group has its origins in a program launched early in the Obama administration to promote broadband deployment and use. The City got a grant under that program to help get seniors and people with disabilities online. Working with nonprofit groups, what was then known as the Department of Aging and Adult Services — now the Department of Disability and Aging Services — used the money to install computers in community centers and teach digital-literacy classes.
As the money under that program dwindled, those involved in the effort and those who benefited from it were concerned about keeping it going, said Marie Jobling, co-executive director of the Community Living Campaign, the Tech Council’s parent organization. While they had made progress under the program, large portions of seniors and people with disabilities in The City still weren’t using the internet. Advocates put that figure at more than 30% of both groups in 2013, noting that San Francisco had set a goal of getting 90% online by 2015.
“All of us who were doing this work and really believed in it and were committed to it … were really anxious to step up and push hard to make sure that the program continued not just because we were [government] contractors, but we really saw the benefit of it,” Jobling said.
High-speed internet is installed in the Mission and Duboce area of San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017.
Josh Sabatini/The Examiner, file
There was, then and now, a kind of ageist assumption that older people can’t or don’t want to learn how to work with computers, said Anne Hinton, the former executive director of DAAS and one of the original Tech Council co-chairs. But that’s not what the people who worked with them were finding.
Even then, it was becoming clear that broadband could be an important tool for older people and those with disabilities, Hinton said. Immigrants in The City were using it to keep in touch with family members they left behind in their former countries, she said. Residents from other parts of the country were similarly using it to stay connected with hometown friends and family, she said.
But broadband also offered the promise of helping such seniors and those with disabilities engage and interact with the local community and The City’s government, Hinton said.
“The folks that we’re talking about need as much ability to share their voice and their experience as anybody else does,” she said. “This is the way.”
The Community Living Campaign and other groups organized what they called a “Keep Us Connected” campaign to convince city leaders to dedicate money to continue their effort to close the digital divide for seniors and people with disabilities. Not only did the organizations succeed, but they secured from DAAS $10,000 in funding for a group that would oversee and help coordinate the effort to get seniors and people with disabilities online.
The resulting organization is known today as the SF Tech Council.
From the beginning, the Tech Council has had a broad range of members. Among them were representatives of businesses, including Comcast and Microsoft; nonprofits, including Community Technology Network and Self-Help for the Elderly; philanthropic organizations, including the Metta Fund; health care providers such as Kaiser Permanente; and local government agencies, including DAAS and the San Francisco Public Library.
Its leadership was similarly diverse. Hinton had local government ties, co-chair David Lindeman was an academic who headed the Center for Technology and Aging at UC Berkeley and had connections in the health-care industry, while then-Microsoft executive Scott Mauvais had an extensive network in tech.
The members met monthly, originally in the offices of the Dutch consulate in San Francisco. The Netherlands had experience coordinating groups’ efforts to bridge digital gaps, and an official in the consulate had taken an interest in the council’s efforts.
Those meetings provided a forum for members to discuss projects they were working on, funding opportunities and the challenges they were facing, Mauvais said. One of the things the group quickly realized was that just ensuring that everyone in The City had a broadband connection was not going to solve the digital divide, he said. People needed to have devices to go online, he said. They needed to be trained to use online services. There needed to be online content that was targeted at them.
“Broadband was necessary, but not sufficient,” Mauvais said.
“We needed to provide a bunch of other services around that,” he said.
The Tech Council worked with groups such as Oakland’s Tech Exchange, which refurbishes computers, to get laptops for those who needed them, he said. It worked with community organizations to determine relevant lessons for their members. Microsoft helped to put together digital-literacy materials. And the council worked with the library to help distribute materials to the people who needed them, Mauvais said.
People work on computers at the San Francisco Library Main Branch on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017.
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Its meetings also served as a place where people from different organizations could connect and figure out how to collaborate. City Librarian Michael Lambert, who was a Tech Council member in its early days, pointed to Dev/Mission as one particular example.
“These kinds of collaborations would not happen if the Tech Council did not convene all of us on a regular basis,” Lambert said.
“Everybody is able to contribute together, leverage resources and form these incredible partnerships,” he said.
The Tech Council, which is largely funded by the Department of Disability and Aging Services and the Metta Fund, has seen some changes over the years.
Its budget is a bit bigger, though still modest at about $250,000 a year. It moved its meeting space from the Dutch consulate to NeighborNest, a community venue in Hayes Valley, before going virtual during the pandemic. In 2020, it hired Andrew Broderick and Karla Suomala to lead the organization as its co-directors. Hinton, Mauvais and Lindeman stepped back from their leadership roles.
The Tech Council has also changed its points of emphasis at times. In the summer of 2019, the council geared up to focus on a workforce development effort for seniors and people with disabilities, Suomala said — but that effort was stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting lockdowns highlighted the fact that many people in The City still lacked broadband connectivity at home and the knowledge of how to do things online, she said.
Even with all the changes, addressing the digital divide for seniors and people with disabilities by fostering collaboration among various stakeholders remains at the core of the Tech Council’s mission, Suomala said.
Those have proven very popular, Suomala said. People come in looking for help with tasks such as resetting their passwords, using video-calling apps and figuring out why their phones won’t save any more photos, she said.
“It’s almost everything,” she said. “And once they ask one question, it will lead to seven more.”
One of the group’s more recent initiatives is to help train older people and those with disabilities on how to interact with their health-care providers via apps, Suomala said.
Working with UCSF and a group of community organizations, including Community Tech Network, the Council developed a mock program called Your Chart. Your Chart works similarly to apps offered by health-care providers, but doesn’t save or link to any patient or personal information, she said. And it’s a website, so there’s nothing to download.
Your Chart allows people unfamiliar with such apps to practice interacting with them and learn what they can do with them, such as making appointments, checking lab results and communicating with doctors, Suomala said.
Those who participated in pilot tests of the site “had no idea, many of them, that they could do that,” she said.
The Tech Council has also been working on some bigger projects. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed under the Biden administration includes funding for digital equity projects. The law set aside a pool of about $750 million to $1 billion that was available to communities across the nation on a competitive basis. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which oversees the grant program, opened up applications for it this summer.
In preparation for that, the Council prepared and released in February a report looking at the state of digital equity in San Francisco, detailing the progress the City had made and making recommendations on what it had left to do. It also helped bring government agencies and nonprofits in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties together to develop and submit an application for a $12 million grant under the NTIA program.
“Digital equity is not stopping at the edge of the bay,” Suomala said.
And the group continues to keep its member organizations informed and helps them work together.
“The work that they’ve done continues to improve, continues to be impactful,” said Paulo Salta, a program manager at the Department of Disability and Aging Services who oversees its work with the Council.
“It’s really putting San Francisco city and county in a good position in terms of bridging the digital divide,” he said.
If you have a tip about tech, startups or the venture industry, contact Troy Wolverton at twolverton@sfexaminer.com or via text or Signal at 415.515.5594.
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