West Fort Hill – The Southwest Commission is researching ways to improve rural internet access – with Dogwood Health Trust grant money available – and is conducting scoping meetings to identify specific needs in North Carolina’s westernmost counties including Graham County.
A “digital inclusion” meeting was held in Graham County on July 27 at Robbinsville United Methodist Church as part of the process.
The session – which lasted about 90 minutes – was attended by a number of local civic, business and education leaders, but no one from local government.
Tonya Snider of Sylva-based tenBiz facilitated the meeting. (Snider is also facilitating plans for Graham County’s sesquicentennial celebration coming up later this month.)
Snider said the Southwest Commission is developing plans for the seven westernmost counties in the state as well as the Qualla Boundary, territory held as a land trust by the United States government for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The Qualla Boundary includes portions of Jackson, Swain, Macon, Graham and Cherokee counties.
North Carolina is the first state in the nation to have all its counties included in a digital inclusion plan, Snider said.
“We want to make sure we did justice to each individual county,” she said.
Snider said the project is looking for feedback from a broad mix of community leaders, including faith, education, health, business, government, social services and public safety. She collected a list of names of leaders who were not at the meeting and plans to reach out to them.
The first phase of the project is to identify assets and needs for each county as well as the Qualla Boundary. The second phase is to apply to Dogwood Health Trust to fund areas that need improvement. Dogwood Health Trust had more than $92 million in investments across Western North Carolina in 2021. It serves Avery, Burke and Rutherford counties, and all counties west of them in North Carolina.
“This has some dollars behind it, so we can see some momentum going forward,” Snider said.
Like the rest of mountainous, rural North Carolina, Graham County is a patchwork of internet services, ranging from high-speed broadband to no service available, with DSL and satellite services falling in the middle. The goal of the project is to identify limiting factors and plug gaps. “All the components need to come together,” Snider said.