Free Wifi - Englewood Project

Four years ago, while sitting in a cold server room on the West side of Chicago, Julian Kidd and Donnell Layne were having a conversation about the economic outlook for the Black and Brown children of Chicago and it was grim.   With 25 percent of its African-American residents jobless, Chicago had the highest Black unemployment rate among the nation’s five most populous cities.

We created a company, Bridging The Gap (BTG) and decided to focus on providing low cost high speed broadband in low income neighborhoods in Chicago because without equal access to the Internet today, you are essentially cut off from opportunities.

You can’t apply for a job or increasingly, you won’t be eligible for a job in our new economy.   Approximately 100 million Americans still do not have broadband access and a disproportionate number are people of color, low income, or lacking a college education.

With BTG's first project, we provided the greater Englewood CDC with broadband speeds that are 33 times faster than what they had in place.

So that got us all thinking - we should do this for the entire neighborhood.

Please donate to help this project become a reality. We must raise $150,000 in the next 30 days to stay on target with implementation.

The funds raised will be used to purchase hardware / software to create a wireless mesh that will allow the residents of Englewood to connect to the internet for free.