Find a Team 

Most Connecting Rural Communities projects start with an individual or a small group of individuals who realize how important broadband services and the use of digital technologies are to their community's economic and social well-being.

Start With A Shared Interest

Find a small core team of community members to help you start this process. They should represent:

• Government
• Public safety services: police, fire, and EMTs
• Citizens
• Health Providers & Services
• Youth groups
• Education: K-12 to College, both public and private
• Businesses: large and small
• Work at home moms and dads
• Nonprofits
• Economic Development
• Telephone Companies, Cable Companies, Electrical Utilities, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and other existing or potential broadband vendors
• Anyone with a interest in the project

Be inclusive; everyone has a stake in creating a connected Community.

Invite people to join you to learn about broadband and consider how your community can take advantage of it.

The Leadership Team

A leadership team will make or break a connecting rural communities project. Whether you are only going to work on a few small projects or undertake a multi-year initiative to build digital capacity across the community, you need to recruit and organize a leadership team to energize and guide the project from start to finish.

Connecting Rural Communities Project Champion

Most successful connecting communities projects will have one or two individuals who acts as project champions. The champion should understand how digital technologies can benefit individuals and organizations in the community. The champion needs to be able to communicate these benefits in non-technical terms. The champion will:

• Recruit Leadership Team members.
• Organize Leadership Team meetings.
• Arrange for one-on-one or small group discussions with key community leaders.
• Identify and recruit residents to serve on Connecting Rural Communities project teams.
• Attend meetings of community organizations such as governmental boards, service clubs, non-profits to discuss the Connecting Rural Communities project and its role in moving the community into the Information Age.

Successful champions should be charismatic, have good communication skills, understand the importance of digital technologies for the future of the community and be able to build commitment for the effort among members of community organizations.

Connecting Rural Communities Leadership Team

The leadership team will direct and coordinate the process of identifying potential connecting rural communities projects. The leadership team will be most effective if these individuals understand or are willing to learn about the benefits digital technology will bring to the community's children and families, schools, businesses, government, libraries, and non-profits.

The leadership team should have from 3 to 9 members. Members must strongly believe that information technology is crucial to the future of the community.

The members don't have to be technology experts. The leadership team will be more effective if there is a mix of community experts and technology experts. Community experts are individuals who are influential and know the community power structure. Technology experts include IT directors and staff from community-based organizations including government, business, healthcare, and education.

The members must be willing to learn and work together to bring the community's leadership and resources to focus on helping move the community into the Information Age.

Leadership team members will have to network with the formal (governmental, business, religious and non-profit/foundation) and non-formal (social organizations, service clubs) leaders in the community. Task Force members should represent as many of the following groups as possible.

The Leadership Team Identification Worksheet (PDF) can help you identify potential leadership team members.

The key responsibility of the leadership team is to guide the process of increasing digital development in the community. Because digital development is a process that occurs over time their responsibilities and activities will evolve. The leadership team will likely be directly involved in the initial projects. As the connecting communities project evolves - engaging additional organizations and the number of projects grows - the leadership team will take on other roles including coordinating communication between project teams and facilitating teams through the process. The connecting rural communities process – Learn, Assess, Vision, Design, Implement, Evaluate – will become second nature to leadership team members.