June Coalition Recap: How Housing Stability and Internet Access Shape Each Other
Written by Peter Arvanitakis, edited by Leslie Scott
June 5, 2026 – The June meeting of the KC Coalition for Digital Inclusion brought together four voices from the region’s affordable housing and digital equity sectors for a rich conversation on how housing stability and internet access shape each other. Health Forward Foundation’s Adriana Pecina and John Tramel, LISC Greater Kansas City Executive Director Geoff Jolly, Hispanic Economic Development Corporation (HEDC) Executive Director Pedro Zamora, and Phoenix Family Program Manager Jessica Welch joined KC Digital Drive Digital Inclusion Program Manager Leslie Scott to explore what it means to live at the intersection of two of Kansas City’s most persistent inequities.
Featured Content: Housing and Digital Inclusion
Panelists:
- Adriana Pecina, Impact Strategist, Health Forward Foundation
- John Tramel, Impact Strategist (Place), Health Forward Foundation
- Geoff Jolly, Executive Director, LISC Greater Kansas City
- Pedro Zamora, Executive Director, Hispanic Economic Development Corporation (HEDC)
- Jessica Welch, Program Manager, Phoenix Family
Health Forward Foundation: Why These Issues Are Linked
Health Forward Foundation opened the conversation with an overview of their work. A conversion foundation created 20 years ago from the sale of a hospital chain, Health Forward operates across six counties: Allen, Johnson, and Wyandotte in Kansas, and Jackson, Cass, and Lafayette in Missouri. Their work centers on health equity and racial and economic inclusion, organized into four purpose areas: platform, people, power, and place.
John Tramel, who works on the Place Purpose team, made the connection to digital equity explicit. “To reduce disparities in digital access and literacy” sits alongside increasing affordable housing and homeownership opportunities as a core outcome for his team. Health Forward has invested close to $2 million in digital equity partners over the last three years.
John drew a direct line between the history of housing discrimination via financial redlining and the current digital access gap. “There was a digital redlining that took place,” he said. “These are for-profit decisions that were made that certain communities weren’t worth investing in.”
The racial disparities Geoff Jolly cited from LISC KC data underscore the point: roughly 70% of white families own their homes compared to about 40% of Black families, and approximately 80% of white households have home internet service compared to 55-60% of Black households.
LISC Greater Kansas City: A Community Lender’s View From the Middle
Geoff Jolly described LISC as “a bank with a mission,” a community development financial institution celebrating its 45th anniversary in the Kansas City market. LISC nationally operates in 35 urban markets and partners with organizations across 2,500 rural counties, giving it an unusually wide view of how digital access plays out across geographies.
Kansas City faces a housing shortage of roughly 64,000 units, a number that has grown since Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) first calculated it in 2023. In response, LISC KC helped launch a regional housing partnership with MARC during COVID, organizing around seven elements of a thriving housing ecosystem: connectivity, public policy, financing tools, production and preservation, authority, and workforce. This fall, LISC KC and its philanthropic partners, including Health Forward, will launch a $100 million regional housing fund using a mixed-income strategy to distribute affordable housing across the metro rather than concentrating it in specific areas.
Geoff noted that while smartphones are nearly universal among affordable housing residents, home broadband is not. “If you look at those who live in affordable housing, they are much more likely, typically twice as likely as the general population, to lack in-home broadband services.”
He also flagged a practical barrier to access and civic engagement: online-only processes for finding housing, submitting maintenance requests, and engaging with city governments exclude people with data caps or smartphone-only access. “We don’t see mailers anymore. We don’t see the public engagement opportunities in person that we used to have.”
Hispanic Economic Development Corporation: The Second Generation of the Digital Divide
Pedro Zamora, Executive Director of the Hispanic Economic Development Corporation, has worked with KC Digital Drive since its inception and brought a practitioner’s urgency to the conversation. HEDC, which was founded 33 years ago to serve the Latino community and has since expanded to serve all limited English-speaking populations, operates through three linked arms: a community development corporation, the Embajada Fund, a community development financial institution (CDFI) micro-lender, and the Center for Urban Enterprise, launched in 2017 to provide stackable credential education.
Pedro described what he calls the “second generation” digital divide: the shift from lack of access to harmful use. Since 2015, HEDC has tracked a decline of approximately 31 basis points in education performance in science, math, reading, and civic engagement. “We use [technology] for the entertainment aspect of it,” he said. “We can’t go backwards in our ability to train them and educate them.”
HEDC piloted a response on a nine-townhome construction project in census tract 153 on Kansas City’s west side. The project employed nine companies in the trades, seven of which were Latino, six of whom came through HEDC’s entrepreneurship program, five from the immediate neighborhood, and four who used HEDC’s loan fund to bridge project costs. When communication breakdowns between employers and workers threatened the project timeline, HEDC deployed an AI application to monitor jobsite mood and incentivize engagement with a loan rate discount. The result: a 13% increase in construction performance.
For the housing units themselves, HEDC is working toward controlling the routers that serve residents, providing free internet access while using national data on educational outcomes to shape what the network delivers. “We want to ensure that they’re using it correctly,” Pedro said.
Phoenix Family: Access Where People Live
Phoenix Family contracts with the owners of 37 affordable housing communities to provide on-site services, with dedicated staff building relationships with the same residents over time. On any given day, more than 5,700 people have access to those services. The average annual income of Phoenix Family clients is approximately $11,500.
Jessica Welch, Phoenix Family Program Manager, walked through the compounding nature of digital barriers at that income level. Residents often depend entirely on smartphones for internet access, and those smartphones come with data caps. “At the end of the month when maybe the rent’s coming up to be due as well and they need to be able to access the internet more than ever, they don’t have as much access to the internet.”
She cited a concrete example that illustrates how digital exclusion cascades: residents unable to put a bus app on their phone were instead waiting in line for physical bus passes.
She also noted infrastructure barriers inside affordable housing buildings, where wireless signals may only reach a community room, and financial barriers beyond the monthly bill. “You have to have a credit card on file to be able to have an account for the internet. Or you can access free internet at your community, but first we have to pay the $50 connection fee that you’ll get reimbursed later. But still, that’s a barrier if you don’t have $50.”
Phoenix Family is currently leading the Coalition for Equity and Opportunity collective impact project with roughly 10-15 partner organizations, including KC Digital Drive, Great Jobs KC, MERS Goodwill, and others, alongside partners with lived experience of the systems they are trying to change. The project focuses on the “benefits cliff,” the point at which earning more income causes recipients to lose benefits faster than their paycheck grows. Pedro and Jessica both pointed to this as one of the most underappreciated barriers to economic mobility, and Phoenix Family is working to develop bridge funding that can carry people through those cliff moments on the path to economic mobility.
One story from Jessica captured the stakes clearly: a client who received a desktop computer through PCs for People was able to take a work-from-home job, which also solved a childcare barrier during the summer. She moved from $16 an hour to $24 an hour. “Just seeing where that access can really directly bolster economic mobility.”
Community Announcements
- The coalition’s next meeting will be held on Thursday, July 10 (due to the July 3 observed holiday). Leslie Scott is actively collecting topic suggestions for future meetings. Two ideas raised during this meeting: workforce inclusion for LMI residents in the context of rapidly changing technology, and organizational AI compliance with federal requirements. If you have a topic suggestion, email Leslie at KC Digital Drive.
- Great Jobs KC announced that IT courses have been removed from their current offerings. Brandey Chandler of Great Jobs KC explained that employer demand in the Kansas City market has not materialized at the credential level, with employers continuing to require college degrees for IT positions. “If anyone has influence with employers and can help us better understand what credentials can really get people jobs in that IT space, that’s something that I think this coalition is a good place to start.”
- AI Compliance and Federal Funding: Kenneth Yancy, Chief AI, Intent Digital Marketing, and Data Officer at 3rd Wave Marketing, raised an urgent note for any organization using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot while receiving federal funding. Yancy has been tracking executive orders related to AI governance and flagged that compliance requirements are evolving. “If you are using ChatGPT, Copilot, or whatever you’re using in your organization, it is not compliant with the federal government, and you’re getting funding, at any time they can ask for an audit.”
Visit kcdigitaldrive.org to learn more, sign up for updates, or watch past meetings. Membership is free. Join us for the next meeting on July 10, 2026, from 10:30 a.m. to noon via Zoom. If you are not yet on the distribution list, please email Leslie Scott at lscott @ kcdigitaldrive dot org to be added.