Suncoast Digital Connect Webinar #4 — From Digital Inclusion to Digital Ecology: Designing the Next Chapter of Connection

On December 4th, the Digital Access for All (DA4A) team closed out its 2025 Suncoast Digital Connect Webinar Series with Kyla Williams Tate, Cook County’s first Director of Digital Equity. She is reshaping how one of the nation’s largest counties connects technology, policy, and community with heart and vision.

Her presentation encouraged us to see digital inclusion as a living ecosystem, where infrastructure, policy, and people intertwine. Kyla reminded us it’s not just about technical assets, but caring for the people we aim to serve.

Highlights From The Presentation

• Digital access shapes our lives today: There is no escaping it, given that it can be found in education, work, health, civic participation, and more. Digital inclusion isn’t a checklist, but it’s a living environment. Digital inclusion is also woven into every human need, from social to physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, environmental, and intellectual.
  
  
• Think of digital access and inclusion as an ecosystem: Digital inclusion is the foundational soil in our digital ecosystem or digital garden. Our digital garden represents how technology, people, and institutions interact. A healthy digital life grows in people’s lives when the soil and environment are both strong.
  
  
• We must tend to the garden together: to make our digital garden strong, healthy, and vibrant, we need people from across sectors working together. It all begins with trust, the needed nutrient to ensure there is true collaboration.
  
  
• Don’t forget the people in the work: In the digital access space, it can be easy to focus on how many devices were provided, how my classes were taught, or the type of training provided. Kyla encouraged us to look beyond that to also ask: How do the people consider the training? Do they feel welcomed in the space by the words? Does the experience feel like a human experience or just another box we are checking? Digital inclusion isn’t just about access; it’s about helping people develop a sense of identity, confidence, and belonging in the way they interact with our digital world.
  
  
• Addressing human challenges is crucial: Digital barriers include fear, shame, and lack of trust or belonging. The technical aspect isn’t enough. Without addressing human layers, devices go unused, tech classes stay empty, and connectivity’s value is lost. We can’t offer digital access without confronting these worries.
  
  
• AI as an “evasive species”: It’s the environmental force that’s going to impact the garden we’re trying to grow from the foundation up. Rather than think of it as just a tool, look at it as an amplifier. It adapts to the environment and magnifies what already exists. If the environment is inequitable, then AI accelerates inequity. If the environment is healthy, then AI accelerates connections and opportunities. The future of the AI species is not determined by the technology itself but the environment we have built around it. If we strengthen our ecosystem, we strengthen the good AI can do.

A highlight of the presentation that brought her points home was when Kyla shared an example from her own life, emphasizing again that it’s not just the technical, it’s the people in this work that matter.

When her husband suffered from a health crisis a few years ago, she called the ambulance and sought medical attention. While her husband was being brought to the hospital, the paramedics were tasked with checking him in on route. However, two weeks prior, they had been given a new device in hopes of streamlining the process, but in his case, the skill wasn’t there. Perhaps there wasn’t a conversation regarding that human layer. Did the individual know how to use the device or feel comfortable using the device, or would they share if they didn’t? And in that moment, she was tasked with providing on-the-spot tech support in dire need.

Our digital lives aren’t a one-way pipeline; they’re a river system—flowing, changing, and shaped by the environment.

​As Kyla shared at the end, let’s not build a digital system, but let’s grow digital futures where everyone belongs! We are grateful to have showcased Kyla’s commitment to strengthening a more inclusive digital ecosystem.

​In case you missed the fourth webinar session, you can watch the full recording below!