For more than 50 years, the Boys & Girls Clubs in Raleigh have been helping young people lay a foundation for the future.
Club members have gone on, after high school, to personal and professional success in a variety of fields, including business, finance, performing arts, law, coaching, non-profits, and others.
AT&T recently helped the club begin a new chapter, opening the first Connected Learning Center in North Carolina. Located in the Teen Center, it’s part of the AT&T Connected Learning initiative and our $2 billion commitment to address the digital divide through internet accessibility, affordability and safe adoption.
Gov. Roy Cooper, North Carolina Secretary of Information Technology Jim Weaver, Raleigh Mayor Mary Ann Baldwin, and North CarolinaSenate Minority Leader Dan Blue were on hand to join students in cutting the ribbon and officially opening the new center.
“High-quality, high-speed internet is an essential tool for students to succeed,” said Gov. Cooper. “It’s great to see AT&T and the Wake County Boys & Girls Club working together to help us close the digital divide and strengthen our communities.”
In Wake County, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 K-12 students don’t have access to the internet, computers or skills needed to benefit from the online world, an issue known as the digital divide.
The new center will help to bridge the digital divide by providing free access to a range of digital resources all under one roof, including:
- High-speed AT&T Fiber internet,
- Wi-Fi,
- Dell Technologies computers,
- Free education resources,
- Tutoring and mentoring from AT&T employees.
The free education resources within the center will help students and families participate in digital engagement. These include The Achievery, a free digital learning platform created by AT&T, as well as free digital literacy courses and workshops created with the Public Library Association. The digital literacy course are part of $6 million in contributions to bring free bilingual, in-person digital literacy workshops to more than 400 libraries and community centers across the country.
Our investment in the AT&T Connected Learning Center at the Boys & Girls Club Teen Center is a reflection of our company and our employees’ ongoing commitment to addressing the digital divide in our neighborhoods. We are committed to providing the connectivity and digital resources to help everyone succeed in today’s digital world.
The Boys & Girls Club is a youth services organization that works to help break the cycle of generational poverty by providing activities and resources designed to help the students stay on track to graduate from high school with a plan for the future. Boys & Girls Clubs currently operates seven locations in Wake County, serving school-age youth. About 74% of participants are eligible for free- or reduced-price meals at school, and about 51% are from single-parent families.
Among the ways we are helping connect more Americans to reliable, high-quality internet is our participation in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The ACP provides eligible households with a benefit of up to $30 a month (up to $75 on qualifying Tribal lands) to reduce the cost of broadband service and can be applied to AT&T Fiber or Access from AT&T, which provides internet speeds of up to 100Mbps, where available, for $0. After confirming ACP eligibility, those who qualify can call us at 866-986-0963 to discuss options and order service and must have their National Verifier application ID available.
