World Education Launches Connected Futures Playbook to Accelerate Community-Level Digital Opportunity

From health care and housing portals to summer camp and employment applications, everyday essential services are increasingly digital by default, making meaningful access dependent on a complex interplay of connectivity, affordability, device access, and digital skills. As digital technologies continue to evolve, including the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, so too do the skills, resources, and support needed to participate fully in an increasingly digital world.

Community-based organizations and social services providers often find themselves supporting clients to navigate digital barriers. Yet, these organizations are too often overlooked and under-supported, with few resources tailored to their context and integrated approach to serving their communities.

World Education, a JSI initiative, has published a new resource that directly addresses these challenges by treating digital literacy not as an isolated, standalone program, but rather as a critical thread woven into the fabric of daily community support.

Developed with strategic support from AT&T, the Connected Futures Playbook: Strategies for Advancing Digital Opportunity in Your Community is a comprehensive, human-centered resource designed to empower nonprofits, libraries, and public-sector agencies to seamlessly integrate digital opportunity and skill-building into their existing community services.

Empowering Trusted Community Messengers

Community-based organizations possess the deep relationships and local trust that no algorithm can replicate. Frontline staff—such as case managers, youth mentors, and adult educators—constantly step up to help clients navigate technology barriers but often do so without formal recognition, resources, or strategic frameworks.

“Organizations are already doing extraordinary work of meeting people where they are, from food pantries to housing registries,” said Priyanka Sharma, Director of JSI’s World Education initiative. “This playbook is built directly around their existing programs and goals. It is designed to turn daily technology hurdles into meaningful, teachable ‘pivots’ that build long-term digital resilience.”

Inside the Playbook: Five Stages from Design to Implementation

The playbook offers a flexible, non-prescriptive framework built across five distinct strategic scenarios:

1. Review and Discover: Aligning digital opportunity efforts directly with an organization’s core mission and conducting asset mapping to leverage existing community strengths.
2. Ideate and Strategize: Identifying precise points of “digital friction”—where technology creates a barrier for the client—and designing community-led, flexible service delivery models.
3. Plan for Success: Designing localized “Impact Roadmaps” (Logic Models) and risk-mitigation plans to translate daily tasks into long-term funding and measurable outcomes.
4. Activate Your Strategies: Preparing staff capacity, establishing strict data privacy protocols to maintain client trust, and delivering culturally responsive, individualized digital navigation.
5. Iterate, Improve, and Grow: Continuous program refinement through feedback loops, storytelling techniques that humanize data, and diversified funding models to sustain long-term digital opportunity.

Proven Real-World Strategies

World Education developed the strategies compiled in the playbook through our work supporting community-based organizations that host AT&T Connected Learning Centers (CLCs). AT&T CLCs deliver vital, no-cost tools to community members—ranging from internet connectivity and hardware to personalized coaching and skill-building.

The playbook highlights how local organizations are already putting these principles into practice. A few examples:

• North Carolina: At the Boys & Girls Clubs of Wake & Johnston Counties, the Club’s career coach partnered with a local driving school to offer a fully online driver’s education course inside the club’s computer lab, providing a critical stepping stone to employment and independence for rural youth.
• Northeast Mississippi: El Centro in Tupelo tapped existing and community resources, including workshop space and volunteers, to offer computer basics workshops and integrate digital skills into programming related to financial literacy, small business ownership, and home ownership.
• Dallas, Texas: Jewish Family Service of Dallas seamlessly embedded technology instruction into their existing English Language Learning classes, food-bank distributions, and resume workshops.

The Connected Futures Playbook features ready-to-use, practical toolkit resources, including frameworks for developing client profiles, identifying digital friction points and turning them into opportunities, and mapping metrics, privacy needs, and sustainability strategies.

“AT&T is committed to expanding digital opportunity through our Connected Learning Center initiative, and World Education has helped community organizations and frontline staff turn that commitment into action,” said Mylayna Albright, Vice President, Corporate Responsibility, AT&T. “The Connected Futures Playbook means that organizations everywhere can access a blueprint for creating digital opportunity in their community and is one way our initiative can have ripple effects far beyond the walls of the 100 Connected Learning Centers.”

To access the free digital version of the playbook and learn more about World Education’s ongoing digital opportunity initiatives, visit here.