Catharine Rice is Project Director for the Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC), and consultant with Broadband-Matters. For more than a decade, Catharine has been a cable and broadband consultant serving North Carolina communities in planning and deploying local broadband systems and closing the digital divide, focusing particularly on those communities in the Research Triangle area and surrounding rural counties. Highlights of her work include contributing to the development, implementation, and now current promotion of North Carolina’s first community-owned, fiber-to-the-home Gigabit network in Wilson, North Carolina and grassroots organizing for small town broadband projects. Ms Rice is known for her grassroots lobbying to defend local community authority to offer broadband services between 2007 and 2011. She is as former Board member of NATOA, the President of its Virginia Chapter, VATOA, Chair of the City of Alexandria, Virginia’s IT Commission, and a founding member of NC Broadband Matters, a North Carolina nonprofit and chapter of CLIC. She holds a Masters’ Degree from the Annenberg School of Communications and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.