Community Digital Awareness (CDA) Framework
Building Community Digital Awareness Capacity as a Rural Health Intervention (CDA)
Children are growing up within digital communication ecosystems — and those ecosystems are now part of the environments that shape health, learning, relationships, and community life.
Community Digital Awareness (CDA) is a framework for building shared capacity among the adults, organizations, and institutions that support rural children and families. It gives communities a common baseline for understanding the communication environments children navigate across home, school, healthcare, libraries, youth programs, workplaces, faith communities, and other local systems.
Rather than placing responsibility on individual parents or treating digital life as a separate “online” issue, CDA approaches digital communication as part of the social and community environments where children grow up. The goal is to help adults recognize change, ask better questions, maintain trusted relationships, and connect children and families to support when needed.
This makes Community Digital Awareness a community capacity-building approach within rural health — one that connects communication, technology, relationships, and the broader environments that influence children's and families' lives.
I particularly like “Building Community Digital Awareness Capacity as a Rural Health Intervention” because it immediately tells a public-health audience: this is an intervention framework, this is about capacity, and this belongs in rural health.
Help the Center on Rural Parenting expand and share Community Digital Awareness resources with rural-serving organizations, families, and communities and donate today.
The Blackroads Project on Midwestern Gossip
For far too long, the myth of the white rural monolith has covered the truth: that Blackness, queerness and other identities exist in rural communities. This cultural suppression has worked to erase us from history and silence our voices.
The Blackroads Project aims to change this narrative and highlight the voices of real rural folks across the Midwest and uplift the unique opportunities and assets that lie in our communities by sharing our stories and shedding light on the rich spectrum of identities Midwestern rural communities hold.
The Blackroads Project is a program of The Center on Rural Parenting, a rural Reproductive Justice organization working to improve parenting environments in rural communities through action, storytelling and sharing accurate information.