PF Casual

Low-income families can’t afford internet access

Today 59% of low-income families take money out of their essential needs (rent, food, recreation) to pay for internet access, and 8% of low-income families can't afford internet access entirely (according to an ACORN survey of low- and medium-income families). While public internet access helps alleviate some of this, it is fairly limited in its reach. This lack of access, especially hurts job-seekers and students in rural areas, who are trying to balance personal and professional development, with holding down low-paying jobs.

Let’s democratize internet access!

Rogers Community Access is a web portal that facilities wifi hotspot lending programs, in conjunction with public library systems.

The goal of this system is to do the following:

Utilize public library’s device rental programs to manage the lending of wifi hotspots (decrease liability)
Establish low cost prepaid data plans for the participants of this hotspot program (reduce commitment)
Utilize Roger’s data management services to provide observability to participants

There is already support for such an initiative

Wifi Hotspot Lending Pilot is already in progress as a partnership between Toronto Public Library and Google Canada, Rogers! But these programs are very limited or non-existent in suburban and rural Ontario...

Built With

Submitted to

Elevate Tech Jam 2019

Created by

I helped scope down and hone in on the problem that we were trying to solve.

Arel Roche
I worked on the Front End, helped with state management, making the front end to talk to the back end, and routing.

Ian McCausland
I worked on the backend Rails API and database setup.

Meep Kaur
I worked on the Front end application which was built in React. It was the first time I have properly used the web based React library which talks to a Ruby back end.

Will Mero
Frank H