Lloyd Levine: COVID-19 and The Digital Divide

In this episode, President of Filament Strategies LLC and former member of the California State Legislature, Lloyd Levine talks with students from the UC Riverside School of Public Policy about the effects of COVID-19 on students, legislation, and non-essential business.

About Lloyd Levine:

Lloyd Levine ('92) is a UC Riverside alumnus and one of the state’s leading experts on energy, telecommunications, and technology policy. Between 2002 and 2008, Mr. Levine served as a member of the California State Legislature where he was chair in the Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce.  He is now president of Filament Strategies, a Sacramento-based consulting firm, and provides consulting services in the technology and environmental sectors. As president, Mr. Levine works on  issues ranging from Electric Vehicles to broadband adoption and the digital divide. Mr. Levine is also an Advisory Board member of UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy and in 2018 he was named a Senior Policy Fellow.

Learn more about Lloyd Levine via https://spp.ucr.edu/about/people#advisory_board

Podcast Highlights:

“I think it’s going to exacerbate existing disparities...households where the parents don’t have the education level or where they have to go out of work and can’t help the children, those sorts of things will make it more challenging.”

-       Lloyd Levine on the topic of the consequences of remote learning during COVID-19.

“Ultimately, I don’t even know when we’re going to go back, I don’t even know how we are going to go back. Are we going to go back in July and it’s going to be phased in to return to work, vulnerable people stay home. How do we determine who’s vulnerable?”

-       Lloyd Levine on the topic of the uncertainties on how work life will resume during Covid-19.

“The theatre organizations with a budget between 2 million and 10 million are really struggling... We have no revenue coming in, but unlike the big ones we don’t have any endowment.”

-       Lloyd Levine on the topic of how the art community is being affected by Covid-19.

Guest:

Lloyd Levine (UCR alum, School of Public Policy Senior Policy Fellow and Advisory Board Member)

Interviewers:

Maddie Bunting (UCR Public Policy Major, Dean’s Chief Ambassador)

Arleth Flores Aparicio (UCR Public Policy Major, Dean’s Ambassador)

Music by:

Samuel Roberts (UCR Public Policy ‘20)

This is a production of the UCR School of Public Policy: https://spp.ucr.edu/

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