Last fall, in partnership with the City of Boston, the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) launched a slate of digital literacy courses.

The city, the recipient of a $1 million Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) Digital Equity Partnerships Program grant, connected with the BHA to expand and improve its digital equity efforts.

One of BHA’s major initiatives spotlights MBI’s Digital Equity Partnerships Program goal of bridging the digital divide and enhancing digital access by establishing and implementing digital literacy training programs.  

These MBI-funded, BHA-hosted programs help ensure Massachusetts residents have the necessary skills to use devices, online resources and digital tools to improve their daily lives.  

Courses, like those offered by BHA, make learning more accessible and empower participants to learn with confidence.  

In this specific course, 20 participants registered for the program, half of whom were Cantonese speakers and ESL students. To better suit all participants’ needs and empower residents from all backgrounds to confidently learn digital literacy skills, the BHA decided to individualize its planned digital literacy curriculum. The team split the initial cohort into two separate courses, one for Cantonese speakers, the highest representation of non-English speakers enrolled in the MBI-funded program, and a second for the remainder of registrants.