Catharine Rice

Project Director
Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC)

Catharine Rice is project director for the Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC), and a consultant with Broadband Matters. For more than a decade, she 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 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 and with grassroots organizing for small town broadband projects. Currently she is helping communities utilize Cares Act and American Rescue Plan Act funds for rural fiber deployments. Rice is known for her grassroots lobbying between 2007 and 2011 to defend local community authority to offer broadband services. She is a former board member of NATOA, the immediate past president and treasurer of its Virginia chapter, VATOA, chair of the city of Alexandria, Virginia’s IT Commission, and a founding member and secretary of NC Broadband Matters, a North Carolina nonprofit and chapter of CLIC. She holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from the Annenberg School of Communications.