A Letter From the President

Welcome to this year’s edition of our Quilt Circle. Our 2023 edition presents highlights of our Quilt members’ public-service missions in action supporting our nation’s community anchor institutions. Our membership, comprised of the U.S. non-profit research and education (R&E) networks, provide community anchors with unique networking and IT service capabilities that are purpose-built for these institutions and their communities.

We are at an inflection point with the generational investments currently being made by the federal government in broadband access and adoption. Our R&E networking community has been focused on this type of work for decades with their community anchor partners and stakeholders. We are excited to be building the possibilities of tomorrow with our collaborators. The R&E networks are well poised to partner with state broadband offices, commercial partners, and community leaders for meaningful projects to achieve the goals of the current federal investment efforts. Read on to learn more about the middle-mile infrastructure and digital inclusion projects that our members are leading in their states.

Among these stories from the field of R&E networking are fascinating examples of how our members provide access to the advanced research IT ecosystem, enabling scientific discovery and educational pursuits by our country’s higher education community. Naturally, the National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are referenced in these stories, as the NSF is a key partner with its investments in research IT infrastructure and programs. Our R&E networking community strongly holds a strategic vision for our country of digital equity for all higher education institutions. One aspect of this goal is to provide all types of higher education institutions--including historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, minority serving institutions, and community colleges--not only advanced networking capabilities, but also access to the tools and resources within the advanced research IT ecosystem. We highlight examples of this focused work with these institutions in the following pages.

The success of our community over the past decades is based on our ability to forge meaningful partnerships and continually adapt to serve the unique IT needs of our community anchor partners. As we emerge from the global pandemic, evidence of this adaptation is captured in several of our member stories about building network capacity, strategic planning, and the deployment of wireless solutions.

These stories from the field underscore how our members thrive in environments of great challenges as well as opportunities. We are proud to share these stories of our public-service missions in action with you and how through working together, we continue to strengthen our national R&E networking community that we call “The Quilt”.