HartlePower was delighted to announce the awarding of funding from both the County Durham Community Foundation and the National Lottery to help us combat the effects of the Corona virus both on our own operation and in the wider the community.

 

With regard to the latter, many families and individuals without access to the internet, or even without a computer or tablet. The term ‘digitally excluded’ is now being used to refer to such people- and we had, thanks to the two funders a solution to the problem; the Broadband Access Programme(BAP), which, once proven, could be ‘rolled-out’ across the country.

 

It involved working with our voluntary sector partners, the local authority and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to identify especially disadvantaged people, providing them with a free router and a low cost broadband connection with ‘easy in/easy out’ terms, ‘pay as you go’ and just for 30 days at a time. 

 

Often people on low incomes are understandably wary of entering into even a twelve month contract: the BAP got around this. Initially, 200 homes in Hartlepool and Redcar would benefit, with more planned given the success of the project. 

 

The BAP had grown so successful that it spawned it's own separate entity, Get Connected. Based within HartlePower's Energy Hub 2, the organisation had since had a successful rollout of the initially promised service nationwide.