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Equal Access Santa Cruz County has a simple goal: bridge the digital divide and bring true high-speed broadband to every family in the Santa Cruz community, regardless of income level.

Cruzio Internet and the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County have teamed up to generate funding for our work to bridge the digital divide and get fast, dependable, and affordable internet to families in need.

Education is an integral part of ensuring a bright future for individual students and the broader community alike. All your donations will stay in the community and help local people in the following groups:

• Low-income individuals and families
• K-12 students
• Teachers and teacher’s families

Disparity – In a time when so much of daily life is taking place online, a reliable internet connection is a necessity, not a luxury, but nationally and locally, there are shocking disparities in access to the internet.

Santa Cruz County – while a place where many people thrive – has been a place of persistent gaps in educational opportunity. According to the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, Santa Cruz is graded a C- on its California Broadband Infrastructure Report Card. As the state data shows, below average infrastructure impacts low-income families and people of color the most.

Our Partners

Donate

Our year-one donation target of $250,000 will be used to service these goals in the following ways:

Supporting service to families in need
There are many areas of Santa Cruz County where broadband is available, but
families living there can’t afford the high cost of reliable service. In a continuation of
our current Cruzio Home Internet Access Program, with the donations we receive,
we aim to serve 250 by the end of the first year of the project.

Building new broadband infrastructure
Working families are sometimes situated in low-income areas where housing is
more affordable but adequate internet is simply not available. Funds donated to
EASC will be used to pay for the costs to build new wireless infrastructure in these
areas. Our goal is to install 5 new sites, which will serve up to 500 families in total
in the first year of this project.

Internet drive-ins
Since not every home can quickly get the internet access needed, we began setting
up “internet drive-ins” at the start of the COVID19 pandemic. These are located at
schools and in public parking lots around the county. Each location provides high-
capacity wifi that can serve many people simultaneously from their cars. Donations
to EASC will help fund more of these builds as locations become available to us.