Last week, I spoke with Linnea Dick from the We Matter campaign when I attended the Internet Society's second annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit.
We Matter is an Indigenous youth-run digital campaign that aims to combat mental health stigma and the suicide epidemic in the North through sharing resources with Indigenous youth in small communities.
Dick told me about some of the accessibility issues We Matter is facing due to poor connectivity in rural and remote Northern communities in Canada.
For example, one of the ways the We Matter campaign shares its messages is through videos, photos, art and other online content which were difficult to access in Northern communities with weak Internet connections.
While the issue of a weak Internet connection has no quick fix, We Matter responded to the challenge by offering its content to youth in these communities on USB sticks instead so that they wouldn't have to use the Internet at all.
I think that was such a clever idea – it's simple, it's relatively cheap and it's accessible to anyone with a computer.
But it just goes to show how a poor Internet connection can really impede a Northern community's ability to easily access potentially life-saving mental health resources.
Beyond mental health resources, poor Internet connections make other important services like e-learning inaccessible to remote communities who arguably would benefit from them the most.
If I learned anything from the summit, it's that the situation in some rural and remote Northern communities is worse than most of us think, but the solutions to improving their connectivity aren't simple or cheap.
That said, Mark Buell from the Internet Society was hopeful that despite the challenges, good connectivity in rural and remote places is possible – but only if all stakeholders, community groups and governments collaborate to make it happen.