KC Digital Drive celebrates the "doers striving to change the community"

Kansas City players in digital inclusion and innovation celebrated with KC Digital Drive at The Abbott in Kansas City, above, including a panel discussion led by KC Digital Drive Managing Director Aaron Deacon, left, with B.J. Tanksley, Director of the Missouri Office of Broadband Development, and Jade Piros de Carvalho, Director of the Kansas Office of Broadband Management.

Kansas City’s many partners in building an innovative and inclusive digital community came together to celebrate the work at KC Digital Drive’s Community Partner Event.

“This whole partnership model has been what we are since the beginning,” KC Digital Drive Managing Director Aaron Deacon said in a video production for the audience at The Abbott in the Crossroads Oct. 10.

Information cards distributed on the tables at the KC Digital Drive celebration highlighted many of the collaborative efforts toward inclusive digital innovation.

“People that are passionate, people that have a compelling idea, that’s where we go to support the doers and the actors who are striving to make change in the community,” he said. “We are a capacity-building organization. We go out and try to find people within the community who are trying to solve really critical problems that Kansas City faces and to enable them and empower them and figure out how to connect them in ways to create better solutions.”

The many partners, including LINC, who gathered at the event have a mutual desire to find creative solutions in building an equitable, innovative community.

“KC Digital Drive is really focused on digital transformation and working in digital technologies, seeing how we can build up communities across the city,” said Jim Starcev, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program Manager for KC Digital Drive. This work, he said, especially focuses on “including people that may have not been included before in those discussions.”

The work of meaningful change in digital inclusion requires a systems level of thinking, said Leslie Scott, Digital Inclusion Program Manager with KC Digital Drive.

“Because digital skills intersect everything, from workforce to education to housing, telehealth, all the things that many of us take for granted,” Scott said. “There are a lot of organizations doing digital inclusion work in Kansas City, and we can always do more together and that’s how we’re going to move the needle.

LINC, which was one of the main sponsors of the celebration, has been partnering with KC Digital Drive since 2010, when they first joined forces in mobilizing an effort to help see Google Fiber distributed equitably across the city when Kansas City became the first city to test the new service.

"LINC Caring Communities have enjoyed a longstanding partnership with KC Digital Drive,” said LINC Executive Vice President Janet Miles-Bartee. “We share the same mission of identifying gaps and finding creative solutions. LINC is proud to support KC Digital Drive's work to help more households and more families make strong connections to the Internet, and also give them the skills they need to thrive in school and work and our community."

While the celebration event provides opportunity to celebrate the work of so many organizations “for the public good,” the night strives for more than that, Deacon said.

It’s also meant as a springboard to more and better work, together.

“It offers an opportunity to help broaden and build the community across our different projects,” he said. “It creates greater visibility across our partner network. Because we get involved in so many different kinds of projects, it can be hard to see the through-line or understand how we operate as an organization. By gathering with a broad cross-section of partners and learning about other types of projects, we hope to make it a little bit easier.”