Rob Bentley

Rob Bentley, a former TEDx speaker and multi award winning Global Enterprise IT leader for the Department of Defense, is historically known for independently focusing his extraordinary positive “passion” by #TakingAction to manifest his community ideas to reality. Like so many he works with in the community, he is a military veteran dedicating his life to serving communities in need several years after active duty. Over the last year and a half he has partnered and transformed one of their local community centers into an independent, self-sustained community tech hub delivering endless inspiration and #Opportunity4All. The center now hosts their ongoing, self-sustaining, weekly tech-mentor program that runs not just 1 day, not 1 week, but year round all through the summer. In that short time they have reached and positively impacted several hundreds of lives of youth and their families across the state, but currently most predominantly in Dover, Delaware.

Thus far Cyber Street’s methodical efforts has already empowered and enriched the lives of not just youth, but volunteers, single mother’s/father’s, foster children, combat veterans, teachers, musicians, high school/college students, and technologists with new enlightened career choices to pursue at no cost to them other than finding internet access. His passion of providing #Opportunity4All, continues to rapidly evolve his self-sustaining, scalable, portable, and economically accessible methodology to ANY community in ANY location in just about ANY space to support their Cyber Streets community mission.

As many know the Digital Divide is a term that describes the growing economic and social inequality gap in technology between communities.  As a result, struggling communities are not aware of various low-cost/free, web-based resources that are readily available. In response, Cyber Streets delivers resources directly to the populations that are deficient in technological means.  They accomplish this by building local community partnerships/alliances and gathering donated resources to empower any community center to fully meet its community’s educational/vocational needs at zero cost.  The Cyber Streets program utilizes volunteer mentors, local community resources, and unites businesses and non-
profits to deliver on-demand Cyber, IT, business, and career skills to struggling communities and their families.  The program is also designed to help participants/volunteers acquire professional certifications, college credits, and build potential job opportunities for those who wish to pursue a career in technology which now includes the exciting and rapidly growing field of AgTech. Uniting together with other civic outreach programs, their charge is to harness the power of technology to uplift
and empower the world a byte, youth, and community at a time.