by Darran Gillan – Research Lead Mapping IN+ Principles Project
As someone deeply committed to digital equity, with a background in youth work and community engagement, I’ve dedicated much of my career to exploring inclusive, community centred approaches to bridge the digital divide, helping marginalised groups thrive in digital spaces. As an INCLUDE+ Network fellow, I’ve immersed myself in the INCLUDE+ Principles of meaningful digital inclusion, sustainability, collective care, responsiveness, diversity, and a holistic approach, which I see as a valuable framework for fostering equitable digital transformation. Engaging with these principles has deepened my perspective that digital equity goes beyond access to technology, it’s about equipping marginalised communities with the tools and platforms to produce digital content that authentically represents their lived experiences placing their voices at the centre of the digital landscape.
The UK Government’s newly launched Digital Inclusion Action Plan appears to represent an encouraging move toward addressing digital inequity, centring on four key areas: developing skills to unlock opportunities, tackling data and device poverty, improving access to digital services, and encouraging safe digital engagement. When viewed through the lens of the INCLUDE+ Principles, I see promising alignments and areas where the plan could potentially be enhanced. Drawing on my insights from my research with INCLUDE+ funded initiatives, such as See the Whole of Me, Kinlochbervie Emerging Technologies, The Process of Giving Smartphones to People Seeking Asylum, Truths, The Articulate Hub Project, and Youth-Led Research and Development. I’ve begun exploring how the INCLUDE+ Principles, as demonstrated through these grassroots projects, can inform, complement, and challenge the government’s strategy during the early implementation next steps phase of the action plan.
Exploring the UK Government’s Plan Through INCLUDE+ Principles and Grassroots Projects
1. Meaningful Digital Inclusion
The government’s emphasis on enhancing skills resonate with the INCLUDE+ focus on Meaningful Digital Inclusion, which seeks to empower users beyond just providing access. That said, systemic barriers like socioeconomic inequities might need more attention. The INCLUDE+ approach focuses on co-designed solutions, but the plan appears to have limited mention of grassroots participatory design. Though my interpretation of this principle digital equity requires communities to not only access but also shape digital content, ensuring it reflects their unique experiences that fosters genuine meaningful inclusion.
The See the Whole of Me project is one example of meaningful inclusion by co-designing digital tools with women experiencing complex social factors to support mental health and well-being through creative practices through the power of storytelling and creative media to amplify marginalised voices. By prioritising community voices creates relevant and empowering solutions, potentially aligning with the government’s skills agenda. The action plan might benefit from exploring such co-design approaches to ensure skills training reflects diverse community needs, perhaps avoiding overly standardised solutions.
2. Sustainability
Sustainability, a key aspect of INCLUDE+, it is a mindset focused on building long-term habits, skills, and practices that empower communities to keep using digital tools effectively. It’s about fostering a culture of continuous learning, adaptability, and resilience, so the benefits of digital access and inclusion remain strong even after specific projects have finished. The government’s plan, which addresses data and device poverty, seems to rely significantly on private-sector partnerships, which could pose challenges for lasting impact. Community-led models might offer a more sustainable alternative.
The Kinlochbervie Emerging Technologies project in rural Scotland showcases the transformative power of immersive VR and digital tools in education. By overcoming geographical and socioeconomic barriers, the project offered participants a vision of a future where location no longer restricts access to learning, creativity, or career pathways, aligning with the government’s aim to tackle device poverty. The Digital Inclusion Action Plan could benefit from investing in similar initiatives, which not only support digital equity but also help counter rural depopulation. By enabling young people to pursue careers in technology without having to leave their remote communities, such approaches preserve traditional ways of life while unlocking new economic opportunities.
3. Collective Care
With in the sphere of INCLUDE+, Collective Care is the practice of individuals coming together to support and nurture each other’s well-being, growth, and overall welfare within a community. This aligns with the government’s aim to foster safe digital engagement. However, the plan’s focus on cyber-awareness might not fully address deeper issues like algorithmic bias or online harassment, which can disproportionately affect marginalised groups and socially economically challenged communities.
The Truths project critically examines ableism in digital spaces, asking whether digital technology truly empowers disabled individuals or if it merely serves as a convenient substitute for more robust systems of societal support. Central to the project are the principles of accessibility and cultural relevance, emphasising that “there is no single ‘accessible’ experience for everyone, what works for one person may not work for another.” This highlights a nuanced understanding of diverse accessibility needs. As Abdulle (2019) notes, “Collective care allows for a space to share… lived experiences to form trust,” that trust factor is something the government may want to consider in their goal of promoting safe digital engagement. This principle resonates with the need to centre all voices in the design of digital policies and platforms, ensuring that inclusion is shaped through lived experience and the space for vulnerable communities to feel safe in doing so.
4. Responsiveness
The action plan’s commitment to improving access to digital services seems to echo INCLUDE+’s Responsiveness principle, which emphasises adaptive tools for diverse needs. However, without ongoing community input, services might risk becoming outdated or less accessible.
The Articulate Hub Project, a community-led platform for digital storytelling, showcases responsiveness by adapting tools based on feedback from diverse groups through the development of a five-stages of engagement that aims to provide accessible learning resources for care experienced learners to thrive in the digital age. The need for multiple, interconnected digital spaces to fully support care experienced learners in their learning journey suggests that digital equity for vulnerable groups may require more comprehensive ecosystems of support rather than single-point solutions. This seems to support the government’s aim to make services user-friendly but suggests the value of continuous engagement. The action plan might explore establishing feedback loops with communities to ensure services remain responsive to evolving needs.
5. Diversity
By addressing data and device poverty, the plan appears to support INCLUDE+’s Diversity principle that ensures that solutions are relevant, accessible, and responsive to the unique needs of different communities. By embracing diverse voices and perspectives, projects can better address digital gaps, fostering more inclusive and empowering digital environments for everyone.
The Process of Giving Smartphones to People Seeking Asylum is a good example of a project that provides refugees with devices and data plans, enabling access to essential services like legal aid and health resources. For me this project demonstrates the entire ecosystem of needs, the device itself, ongoing support and cultural sensitivity in the gifting process. It also contributes to broader practices of digital equity by demonstrating how technology is provided through fair, respectful, and safe processes that matter just as much as what is being provided, especially for vulnerable populations.
6. Holistic Approach
INCLUDE+ views digital inclusion as interconnected with broader social and economic inequities, a perspective the government’s plan appears to partially address but may risk oversimplifying by focusing primarily on access and skills. A Holistic Approach might consider tackling root causes like systemic discrimination. The New Narratives project reinforces the understanding that digital equity is deeply intertwined with social inclusion and civic participation, demonstrating how addressing digital skills and access can empower marginalised communities to engage more fully in society and challenge exclusion.
Another example is the Youth-Led Research and Development project, led by young people collaborating with community organisations, exemplify a holistic approach by integrating digital inclusion with leadership development, education, and social justice advocacy. By empowering youth to address local issues like unemployment and housing through digital tools addressing multiple dimensions of exclusion, potentially supporting the government’s skills and poverty goals while addressing structural barriers. The action plan might explore adopting similar multi-faceted strategies, perhaps addressing corporate tech influence and biases in online spaces to foster more equitable digital ecosystems.
Challenges and Opportunities
Corporate Influence vs. Autonomy: The plan’s reliance on private sector partnerships might prioritise profit over public good, potentially limiting digital autonomy. Projects like Kinlochbervie suggest that community led models could offer an alternative, and the government might consider prioritising public interest tech.
Top-Down vs. Grassroots Innovation: The plan’s top-down approach via local councils might overlook opportunities to scale grassroots projects like those supported by INCLUDE+. Supporting community led innovation could potentially align with all four government focus areas.
Digital Literacy and Rights: The plan’s skills focus might be enriched by INCLUDE+’s emphasis on critical digital literacy, as suggested by the Criteria for Age-Appropriate Design project. Incorporating rights education into literacy programs could perhaps empower users to navigate privacy, surveillance, and bias, potentially enhancing safe engagement. The tension between the increasing need for digital engagement to counter negative narratives and the limited digital skills within third-sector organisations suggests that the action plan could prioritise capacity building for these groups to support broader inclusion efforts.
Conclusion: A Foundation to Build Upon – Centring Collective Care in What Comes Next
The UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan appears to be a meaningful step toward equity, but it might be worth considering how INCLUDE+ Principles and insights from grassroots projects like See the Whole of Me, Kinlochbervie Emerging Technologies, The Process of Giving Smartphones to People Seeking Asylum, Truths, The Articulate Hub Project, the Youth-Led Research and Development and Criteria for Age-Appropriate Design could help refine its approach. By exploring co-design, sustainability, and systemic change, the government might enhance digital inclusion to better empower communities with agency and equity. These projects demonstrate what’s possible when inclusion is meaningful and community led, offering a foundation for a more inclusive digital future.
The UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan lays important groundwork, but as our analysis shows, meaningful digital equity demands more than expanded access or upskilling. What we do with access—how it is experienced, who it empowers, and whether it fosters connection or reinforces exclusion—depends fundamentally on the values and structures we embed into our digital inclusion work. One of the most powerful yet under-acknowledged of these is Collective Care.
Across INCLUDE+ projects and the wider research analysis, Collective Care emerges not just as a desirable value, but as an essential condition for inclusion to be genuine, safe, and sustaining.
Without trust, reciprocity, and emotional safety, access becomes hollow. Relationships—not just devices or training—are the real infrastructure of digital participation. As the Kinlochbervie project showed, it was the trust between teachers and students, not the VR headset, that enabled transformative learning. As the Truths and New Narratives projects show, culturally relevant, emotionally grounded spaces allow marginalised communities to build agency, not just engagement.
Yet Collective Care remains structurally hard to implement. Many public digital initiatives operate within funding and policy frameworks that prioritise measurable outputs, speed, and standardisation—conditions that actively work against the slow, relational, often “messy” work of care. We need to acknowledge this openly and make space for new practices and policies that embrace care as a strategic, not peripheral, priority.
Moving forward, we will consider several practical steps in developing and supporting more care-centred approaches to digital inclusion:
- Embedding Collective Care in project design: We will explore how to frame success not just through access or skills, but through metrics of trust, relationship-building, emotional safety, and cultural relevance.
- Supporting care-full infrastructure: We will look at how policy and funding can sustain long-term relationships—such as through escalator funds, hybrid (online-offline) engagement models, and community ownership of tools and platforms.
- Championing lived experience as expertise: Following the call to “value diverse forms of expertise,” we will advocate for formal roles and compensation for community-based digital practitioners, especially those doing emotional and relational labour.
- Developing practitioner guidance on care: We aim to support and share frameworks for professionals—including youth workers, educators, and community organisers—to embed Collective Care in their digital work in ways that are accountable, trauma-informed, and grounded in trust.
- Creating space for refusal and redefinition: We will continue to centre community agency—not only to participate, but also to reject or reframe digital tools that don’t serve them. Inclusion must always allow for opting out, resisting, or reshaping the narrative.
As INCLUDE+ fellows, we plan to convene further reflection sessions, workshops, and dialogues between grassroots projects and policymakers to deepen this conversation. Our aim is to co-produce a set of practical proposals rooted in lived experience and aligned with the IN+ Principles—especially Collective Care, Holistic Approach, and Meaningful Inclusion—that can inform the next phases of the Digital Inclusion startegies in the UK.
What’s clear is this: real digital inclusion doesn’t start with infrastructure, it starts with relationships. If we want digital equity to last, we must first build trust—and then build everything else from there.