Arrowhead Intelligent Region

If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that when it comes to broadband, access denied is opportunity denied.

The Arrowhead Intelligent Region (AIR) initiative brought together northeastern Minnesota economic and community developers to identify and fund projects across the seven-county Arrowhead region that:

• improved broadband infrastructure
• built a knowledge workforce
• incentivized innovation
• ensured digital equality
• enabled community engagement
• ensured environmental and social sustainability

This approach combines an understanding that broadband is essential infrastructure, while emphasizing that communities’ use of broadband drives economic competitiveness. It brought to regional scale the Intelligent Community framework used by 10 Iron Range communities to develop and implement projects that delivered on the promise of a broadband-fueled economy. Blandin Foundation and Iron Range Resources & Rehabilitation committed funds to create a grant pool for regional projects emerging from this process.

To identify opportunities and projects to fund, Blandin and Intelligent Community Forum staff spent the final quarter of 2020 collecting and compiling information for a benchmarking exercise that compared the Arrowhead Region to more than 400 communities around the globe on the framework’s elements: infrastructure, workforce, innovation, digital equity, community engagement, and sustainability.

In April 2021, ICF staff shared the results of their analysis of the entire Arrowhead Region, and of five sub-regions:

Arrowhead Region  |  Duluth  |  East Range  |  Hibbing-Chisholm  |  Itasca  |  Koochiching

Two rounds of grants were awarded in 2021. View the grants list here.