Dave Sevick and Computer Reach Go In the Home - Building for Digital Equity Podcast Episode 15

Sean Gonsalves (00:06):
Hey, this is the Building for Digital Equity Podcast where we talk to people working to expand Internet access, address affordability, teach digital skills, or distribute affordable devices. We talk with those working on the front lines of giving everyone everywhere the opportunity to participate fully in the digital world, whether in rural areas or cities. Our guests here are doing the often [00:00:30] unglamorous jobs in places that have been left behind. This show comes to you from the Community Broadband Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where we have long produced the Community Broadband Bits podcast and the Connect This show Building for Digital Equity features. Short interviews from Emma Gautier, Christopher Mitchell, and me, Sean Gonsalves, talking to people at the events we are attending, to highlight the interesting work and inspirational stories to get Internet [00:01:00] access to everyone. Now let's see who we have today.

Christopher Mitchell (01:06):
I'm here with Dave Sevick, the Computer Reach Executive Director. Welcome back to the show.

Dave Sevick (01:12):
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Christopher Mitchell (01:14):
Sorry, I said welcome back. We hung out, but we didn't do an interview last time

Dave Sevick (01:16):
We talked. We hung out in Portland several

Christopher Mitchell (01:18):
Times at the previous Net Inclusion, and I'm from the eastern side of Pennsylvania. You're over there on the Western side. I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. What's going on in Pittsburgh?

Dave Sevick (01:28):
Pittsburgh's growing. [00:01:30] We have a lot of ISPs in the area and we we're trying to encourage them to take people in their ACP programs. That's the big thing right now.

Christopher Mitchell (01:39):
Before ACP, what was Computer Reach doing?

Dave Sevick (01:42):
Computer Reach has been around 23 years. We're a device refurbisher for the whole Southwestern Pennsylvania area. We also do digital literacy training sessions all over, mostly with older adults. And now we do digital navigator visits. Our digital navigator [00:02:00] program is different than most because we go into people's homes all the time, standard instead of phone calls. So we've been doing digital navigator work for two years, and we're here on the Google brand as well.

Christopher Mitchell (02:11):
When you say going into homes, that's challenging, right? I mean, when I talk with Internet service providers, they do a lot. They historically have done a lot to try and keep their technicians out of homes because anything can happen inside the home, and you need to have people that have a lot of people skills to navigate that.

Dave Sevick (02:26):
That's exactly right. The hiring process is very, we're very careful [00:02:30] to hire the right people with the technical skills and especially the soft skills.

Christopher Mitchell (02:35):
Now the Digital Equity Act is poised to, I think, give organizations like yours more resources here, both through the state, the federal government competitive grants. How are you funded before and how are you funded right now? I guess before this money is available,

Dave Sevick (02:50):
The foundation community in Pittsburgh, there's quite a few foundations there. We sell computers. We have a little computer store. Machines are between 50 to $300 [00:03:00] and individual donations. We have a lot of big donors. Over our 23 years, we made a lot of friends, so that's how we fund ourselves.

Christopher Mitchell (03:07):
Excellent. And so how are you getting ready to take advantage of the Digital Equity Act and the money that's available, the new opportunity that's available, probably other people coming into this space that want to do similar things. How are you looking at the future?

Dave Sevick (03:20):
Well, we applied for your home, your Internet grant, the FCC outreach grant, and had somebody help us do that. We're working for the Just Transition Fund to help coal country [00:03:30] counties

Christopher Mitchell (03:30):
They're doing in Pennsylvania, doing really exciting work,

Dave Sevick (03:32):
Right? Yeah. They approached us, said, would you like a grant? And we found out it was pretty smooth process. They have grant writers that they contract out to help us. So we got in before the January 9th deadline. We're hoping to work in Fayette and Green County. Right now we're doing a lot of work in Washington County. We've always done well in the urban Pittsburgh region. Now we're moving on to the rural areas, and that's challenging.

Christopher Mitchell (03:57):
How is that different from being active in the urban areas?

Dave Sevick (04:00):
[00:04:00] There's a lot of accessibility. There's buses, people in a densely populated area, so you could do a multi-dwelling unit, a senior home and take care of 30 to 40 people at one time in Washington Green and Fayette, Connie, everybody lives 20 miles apart. So in a day's work with your digital navigators, you might help two or three people When you're in Pittsburgh, you can help maybe 10 people on digital navigator.

Christopher Mitchell (04:24):
The real Internet service for us call that windshield time. A lot of windshield time. That's

Dave Sevick (04:27):
Right. And the cost of gas is [00:04:30] inflation really hurts our bottom line, but we know that we have good touch points. We get four sections of data. We do a one hour visit of people's homes to get them started with digital navigator services, email, how to get on the Internet, and then the next three sessions are designed by the user. They may just want something simple. They may want to do workforce development stuff with Google or a Microsoft.

Christopher Mitchell (04:55):
Are your digital navigators all able to do that or do some of them specialize? And [00:05:00] so you have to schedule the right digital navigator for someone that has a specific interest in mind.

Dave Sevick (05:05):
Our digital navigators go through about a month of training and shadowing myself because I was support for Apple Computer for years. So we teach 'em how to do a home visit, not embarrass anybody. Be very supportive, encouraging, don't rush anybody. And then after they shadow me, they can go out on the road with the right skills and the right attitude.

Christopher Mitchell (05:25):
Are these usually people that have undergraduate degrees and things, or is there a set of qualifications [00:05:30] that are common?

Dave Sevick (05:31):
Well, our navigator digital inclusion director has college degree. He's experienced Will Perez, and then we have Zach Peterson. He has college degree and they both have college degrees, so they're graduates, they have good skills, good tech skills, but again, it's their soft skills that are important. When you're a digital navigator, it's 80% social work and 20% tech.

Christopher Mitchell (05:56):
I heard a story that when the Geek Squad started [00:06:00] back a long time ago, and I had a friend who worked for it back in those early years from stories he told going to people's homes. But one of the things that he told me was that early on Geek Squad folks had tried to hire people that knew how to use computers well and teach them soft skills, and then after a year or two they flipped and they hired people that didn't know much about computers, but knew how to communicate and then taught them the computer skills.

Dave Sevick (06:24):
Yeah, that's actually Apple computers model too. When you go to, I can't say how many people were [00:06:30] really good techies and they thought they could easily get a job at the Apple store, and the answer is no. They want people that know retail and can talk to people and not act like they're frustrated or roll their eyes or walk away. So that's why Apple's so successful. So I follow the same model when we interview. We can tell if someone's going to be a good fit, kind of challenge them with questions, give them difficult situations, ask 'em how they would handle it, rather than if they know all the sizes of RAM and the difference between a ADA drive and his heart, SSD. [00:07:00] Those questions really don't matter as much as how do you talk to people, how do you relate?

Christopher Mitchell (07:06):
Michael Lewis also had talked about in one of his podcast series, I'm a huge fan of his Me Too. The one where he was talking about the person who runs a moving company, and he would lie to people that came to apply and he would say, oh, I'm sorry, things got tled around today. Can you just help me? I need to move my furniture from one area of the one end of the office to the other so he could watch how they use their body and moved in [00:07:30] space. And that was his tryout really. And it was this false premise that how about that? But everyone came in and he just spent the day interviewing people, moving his stuff from one side of the room to the other with different people.

Dave Sevick (07:41):
Yeah, there's some skills you can't teach. We have a new digital navigator named Sarah Radcliffe. She has Washington County, which is very rural coal country, and she's just fantastic. You could tell during the interview she was going to be a good fit, right?

Christopher Mitchell (07:56):
Yeah. When you are assessing this, now, you're expanding your reach to [00:08:00] greater numbers of people, but do you have a sense, I mean, if you just look in the Pittsburgh area and the urban area where you've been working, is the need increasing? Is it decreasing? Is it staying level in terms of people that need the help that you're offering?

Dave Sevick (08:13):
The people that need help are hard to identify and find. So we do a cohort model where we ask our partners, the housing authorities, the libraries and all that. School districts, number one, school districts, they know everybody that's on snap. They know people that are struggling, so we don't cold [00:08:30] call anybody or advertise in the newspaper. We go to our partners and say, give me the list of who needs needs a computer, who needs training, who needs to have Internet that they can't afford. So that's how we expand through our partners telling us who needs the work. And then they also give us all the demographic data. So our asset mappings are really accurate. They can frequently just give us a spreadsheet and we don't share that personal, the PID at all. So that's how we expand. But rural is tough. People [00:09:00] don't trust anyone. That's why Sarah's from Washington County. She grew up there. She knows everybody. So that makes a big difference. Just getting the trust of your partners and then trust of the school districts and then trusted the families. Oh yeah. I live down by the general store. Yeah, I remember Bob. Next thing you know, everybody in that building or everybody in that neighborhood is willing to participate.

Christopher Mitchell (09:22):
That's excellent.

Dave Sevick (09:22):
Yeah, that's our model. It's different than a lot of others.

Christopher Mitchell (09:27):
When you come to an event like this, I have to feel like [00:09:30] you could probably be on several of the panels. What do you get out of coming to an event like this? It's a lot of, I mean, we're talking 80%, 90% of people have not been to a net inclusion before.

Dave Sevick (09:40):
Right. I've been to them all.

Christopher Mitchell (09:42):
Excellent. You're one of the few.

Dave Sevick (09:44):
And I look forward to, I remember when it was just a hundred people at the beginning when Angela was getting started, Angela and Bill both. But I really look forward to this. Every year I get to meet in person. The people that I talk to online and actually talk a little bit deeper, have a few [00:10:00] beers. So I look forward to it every year.

Christopher Mitchell (10:04):
Yes. I just feel like it's inspiring and I can never really fully expect it, and I always kind of think it's a week. I'm doing a lot of things. I'm missing my family, I'm traveling too much, and then I come here and I'm like, oh, there's just so many great people, and it's just so inspiring to be able to hear Well,

Dave Sevick (10:24):
Your podcasts are great. I listen. Your podcasts get a lot of good information. Good sense of humor. [00:10:30] I love that.

Christopher Mitchell (10:32):
No, I find that a lot of people appreciate it. And then a few people are really annoyed by it.

Dave Sevick (10:37):
Not

Christopher Mitchell (10:37):
Me. Can't avoid it. I get it. What do you think this is going? I mean, do you think in five to 10 years we're still going to have a large population of people who needs this training or are we sort of whittling down the number of people who need it

Dave Sevick (10:53):
Over time? We talk about that all the time. We're, we've been doing that for 23 years now. We do about [00:11:00] a thousand to 1500 a year. We're not as big as PCs for people or human it, but we get quite a few computers out to the Western Pennsylvania. Those machines are getting less repairable every year. So we're backing off of the refurbishing and we're going to do the digital navigator support. Everybody needs support on how to use a computer or how to manage the Internet, how to be safe when surfing the Internet. All of that increases all the time. Western Pennsylvania has a large population of older folks, so we focus [00:11:30] a lot on senior care and nursing homes. We're a big part of Presbyterian Senior Care. They have 43 sites, but I could list a bunch. But

Christopher Mitchell (11:43):
Do you think in five or 10 years you're still going to be overflowing? Do you think there's a period at which your services, you might be pivoting again to do some other form of support? Because at that point people will just, younger people are coming up, I think they'll need less training because you intuitively went to older Americans. That's

Dave Sevick (11:59):
Right. [00:12:00] Yeah. I am not sure. I'm not sure. But right now there's a massive population of older folks. Fortunately, they like old computers and they love big screens, which are hard to refurbish. So we're a sweet spot right now where all these big bank machines that are five to 10 years old with huge 17 inch screens are very attractive. Whereas the younger folks want portable devices that have small screens.

Christopher Mitchell (12:26):
When you say they're harder to refurbish, is this, [00:12:30] what's the movement? I fix it. Is this the right to repair kind of thing where Yes, we definitely devices. They're glued together now, and you just don't have the components you can't take

Dave Sevick (12:39):
Apart. Yeah, Kyle Wines that does that is great. I fix it. Pro members part of that movement, the repair movement, I think they just got through to John Deere right now. You can fix your John Deere tractor,

Christopher Mitchell (12:50):
Which is, I think they struck an interesting deal where I think John Deere has some sort of control over how far they go and things like that. So I'm very curious [00:13:00] to see how this works out.

Dave Sevick (13:01):
Yeah, yeah. They kind of worked out a deal, but they're moving in the right. They're moving in the right direction. So to answer your question directly, we are going to still refurbish computers as much as we can, but big old clunky desktops take up a lot of room in your warehouse and it's expensive to run a warehouse, so you have to balance all that.

Christopher Mitchell (13:20):
Where are you on the debate then about, for instance, Deb Socha has told me before that in her experience, it's just more convenient to get a new Chromecast, not Chromecast, [00:13:30] a new Chromebook or a simple device, which in this case would have a smaller screen, likely you might have to get a separate bigger screen for some of the folks that need it, and then you're just not dealing with the problems that could come from the refurbishing and things like that.

Dave Sevick (13:43):
One solution doesn't fit all. I am not pro Chromebook because if you have to install any Microsoft apps or anything, you can't do it on a Chromebook. It forces you into having a Gmail account. So we stray away from Chromebooks unless somebody wants it just for surfing the web, and they happen to have a Gmail [00:14:00] account and they understand the limitations of a pretty slow but small device. We prefer to have a Lenovo desktop, an I five or an I seven Lenovo. We can do a lot more with that. And we're very, about 90% of what we do is Linux. We have our own distribution of Ubuntu Linux, which is easy to support. The repair calls are very minimal. We do windows too, but there's a lot of phone calls on the window side constantly.

Christopher Mitchell (14:26):
So you mentioned the Microsoft office, that Ubuntu, [00:14:30] is that what you called it,

Dave Sevick (14:31):
Will not run Microsoft Office.

Christopher Mitchell (14:32):
Okay. So I wasn't sure about the level of wine support, the sort of, I don't even know if wine's still a thing anymore.

Dave Sevick (14:38):
Well, we use Berry Office.

Christopher Mitchell (14:40):
I use that too in my main computer at home,

Dave Sevick (14:42):
And you can use it on Mac, windows, and Linux. So it's a good product and you can save things out. So a lot of our digital navigator work with people who've never had a computer. Is Lenox on how to save documents? We good? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so I know that gets a little bit wonky in the weeds there, but we use Liber office in [00:15:00] as much free software as possible.

Christopher Mitchell (15:01):
That's exciting. I remember arguing with my dad 20 years ago, we were arguing about Windows, and I was really getting into Linux and he was saying, he was like, yeah, you've seen this before and it's just not going to get that far. And I said, I think over time the desktop's not going to. I mean, people argue all the time, why is Windows releasing new versions? What do we really need? Just changing the position of the task bar. And I do feel like we're at this place. Linux has taken longer to hit adoption, but I just feel like we're going to keep [00:15:30] seeing that market share grow as people appreciate the benefits of it.

Dave Sevick (15:33):
When you have someone that's never seen a computer before and you introduce them to Linux and we do with a quick learning, a quick sheet, quick start sheet, they do fine. They spend 90% of their time in a browser doing everything they need. And Lenox is solid as a rock. So we love it. We're also part of the Lenox clubs in Pittsburgh, so we encourage it.

Christopher Mitchell (15:54):
That's exciting. That's very cool. Is there anything else we should talk about while we're here?

Dave Sevick (15:59):
I'm glad you're here. [00:16:00] So am I. No, I think Angela Seaford does a great job. 800 people here. 800 people.

Christopher Mitchell (16:06):
Yes. Yes.

Dave Sevick (16:08):
That's amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (16:08):
And I think there's probably a lot more, we don't know yet how many people are going to be on the live stream, but a lot of people are going to be watching. Very excited for people that are doing this work. If you're listening to this, get out to a show and then come out and meet people. There's really great people that come to these. The relationships you'll form, there'll be one in 2024 [00:16:30] and definitely come out for it.

Dave Sevick (16:31):
Yeah. The NDIA website's great too. I got to mention that. A lot of good directions on how to start a coalition, how to get digital navigators trained. So we follow their lead quite a bit.

Christopher Mitchell (16:42):
And then the listserv is, it's significant. You might do a little filtering to not have it overwhelm your inbox generally, but it's full of good information. It is. And people are really doing great work on,

Dave Sevick (16:55):
I mean, government leaders, not just the signal, the noise argument. [00:17:00] There's a ton of signal on the listserv and minimal noise.

Christopher Mitchell (17:06):
Alright, well I think it's time for breakfast. People are showing up. Thank you for talking with us. Okay.

Dave Sevick (17:10):
Alright.

Sean Gonsalves (17:13):
We thank you for listening. You can find a bunch of our other podcast at ilsr.org/podcast. Since this is a new show, I'd like to ask a favor. Please give us a rating wherever you found it, especially at Apple Podcasts. [00:17:30] Share it with friends. You can even embed episodes on your own site. Please let us know what you think by writing us at podcast@communitynets.org. Finally, we'd like to thank joseph mckay.com for the song on the Verge.