This work-in-progress paper answers the question: How do underserved students enhance their digital proficiency and experience empowerment through a community-based course project? Underserved students are students of color, from low-income households, or first-generation students. This qualitative study employed learner empowerment research and community-based project learning as sensitizing frameworks and chose a comparative case-study research design. Our thematic analysis of 30 student narratives revealed five aspects of learner empowerment in the project-based learning: three aspects – project meaningfulness, competence, and community impact - were consistent with prior research while two aspects - instructor passion and community belonging - emerged from the data. Our next steps include collecting a larger data set in spring 2024, enhancing the qualitative data analysis through comparing and contrasting student differences in digital proficiency and empowerment by discipline, project type, and student employment status, and performing quantitative data analysis to enrich the findings.