For years now, Detroit has been in the spotlight as a poster city for urban revitalization . Stories about how brands like Shinola are tapping into the city’s industrial heritage to bolster the economy, and how intrepid urbanists are converting the city’s vacant land into sustainable farms and affordable housing, are commonplace.

But what they gloss over is that many Detroiters still lack a basic service: internet access. Around 40% of people in the city do not have broadband connectivity–which is a problem, as more and more resources like banking, education, and the U.S. Census move online.

Detroit’s uneven economic history is part of what has impeded internet connectivity. Telecom companies often pass over low-income cities and neighborhoods; households in the bottom 20% of the economic spectrum are five times more likely to lack internet than those at the top. In 2017, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance described AT&T’s avoidance of poorer neighborhoods of color neighborhoods in Cleveland as “digital redlining,” and said that companies don’t expand into such parts of the city because it doesn’t generate them enough profit to do so.

This situation, the NDIA, has created a necessity for cities and communities across the country to ensure that good internet is accessible to all, regardless of the decisions of big telecoms companies.

In Detroit, the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII) is stepping up to meet that need. In 2016, the Detroit Community Technology Project–a nonprofit founded in 2014 to train community organizers in setting up neighborhood-level internet access–launched EII to increase internet access in three particularly underserved neighborhoods in Detroit, and to educate those very community members who will benefit from the internet in installing and managing it.

Diana Nucera directs the DCTP, which the Detroit-based company Allied Media Projects sponsors with funds from the Obama administration’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. The big question at the time of DCTP’s founding was “whether Detroit was even worth saving,” Nucera says. “People were more interested in the devastation of Detroit than in its resiliency.”

Even as the city began to revive, Nucera and DCTP recognized that restoration was not happening equitably–many lower-income neighborhoods were still left out of the folds of economic development. Securing internet access for these communities, Nucera says, “would allow people to change the narrative by telling their own stories.” DCTP launched EII in 2016 to get communities around Detroit engaged with securing internet access–and using that access to drive change.