Corporate giants join hands with nonprofits to connect Dallas’ disconnected.

Corporate giants join hands with nonprofits to connect South Dallas’ disconnected the least access to laptops and the Internet.

Good things start happening when reasonable minds join hands to solve bad problems.

AT&T and Texas Instruments distributed laptops and hotspots at Jubilee Park and Community Center to students and youth in southern Dallas with the least access to the Laptops Internet.

The event was part of a small joint venture of the Fortune 500 corporations, two private foundations, and the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, targeting particularly technology-vulnerable neighborhoods. They call their initiative Digital Bridges.

Almost 2,854 devices were handed over to kindergarten through 12th-grade students, and young adults aged 18 to 24 have provided equipment and high-speed Internet to an estimated 8,600 people in some of the least connected households in all of Dallas.

According to the latest reports from our sources, around 87,500 households or 218,000 people in Dallas do not have broadband service, with the highest concentration of those in the southern sector ZIP codes.

“Internet access is now an expected utility, similar to water and electricity, allowing us to engage in the most basic of life’s daily necessities,” said Andy Smith, executive director of the TI Foundation and a key player in the Digital Bridges initiative.

“But even in Dallas County, one of the wealthiest in Texas, head south of Interstates 20 and 30, and connectivity either slows down or drops off,” Smith said. “And, if broadband service does exist, it’s unaffordable for many.”

Last year, AT&T gave United Way a $1 million grant to partner with Computdot Dallas, which takes donated laptops and refurbishes them, loads them with software, and gives them to under-resourced youth and their families.

Since then, AT&T, the foundation of TI chairman Richard Templeton and, his wife, Mary, TI’s Foundation, and the late TI founder Eugene McDermott’s foundation have not stopped helping people in need.