Plugged In's community focus is rooted in Decrem's own vision for change. While at Stanford in 1990, the bespectacled Belgian-born law student became bored with his studies and began doing volunteer work with kids and computers at a local boys' and girls' club. From the start, he understood that the real power of the Information Revolution wasn't in the technology itself -- but in teaching people to grab hold of that technology as a tool to help them build better lives. Although Decrem started out working with children, he soon realized that the next logical step was to extend his work to teenagers and adults, to engage the whole community in the process of change.
"The point is to make this technology available in our community so that people can do with it what they want," he says. "In the process of doing that, we're demonstrating that technology can help community members create positive opportunities."
Plugged In's programs all have a defining focus: the intertwining of technology and community, closing the digital divide by seamlessly and casually linking all of these new tools with the lives of East Palo Alto residents. For example, Plugged In's programs are designed to include everyone in the community. Besides the drop-in center, which caters mainly to adults, Plugged In runs two additional programs, one for teens and the other for young children. An after-school program targets teens, providing them with intensive training and education in state-of-the-art Web design. Then it offers them paying jobs so they can put their newly acquired skills to work. Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are among the companies that have hired Plugged In-trained teens at an hourly wage; projects have ranged from a $300 Web page for a world-beat music distributor to a $31,000 site for Pacific Bell.
Even East Palo Alto's youngest residents have a home at Plugged In: Community Kids, Plugged In's after-school drop-in program, is housed next to the computer center. Geared toward children who are between the ages of 5 and 13, the program approaches computer technology as a means to an end -- a tool to help develop art and literacy skills and to open new avenues of communication.
For some children, that means discovering the wonder of email, a world of surprise that the paid staff and local volunteers do their best to encourage. When Roy Souffront, a 12-year-old boy who signed up for an email account, wondered who on Earth would send him email, Këri Bolding, 24, the program's director, made a point of bringing up the boy's name at a staff meeting -- encouraging staff members to write the boy at RoyJr1@yahoo.com as a way of keeping him enthusiastic about email.
Other children tackle more demanding projects, such as learning to scan art into a computer and then to manipulate the scanned image to create their own digital art. Staff members are also there to help children use computers to do their homework, through poetry-writing projects or using the Internet as a research tool.
"A lot of kids who've never seen or used a computer come here," says Bolding, who discovered Plugged In while still a student at Stanford. "But, compared with adults, kids find it easier to transcend their fear of computer technology. These kids find computers fascinating. And we're taking that fascination and turning it into skills that are going to be marketable in the future and that can help them get ahead. These kids are going places in life where they otherwise couldn't have gone."
The program also sparks a lot of social interaction: The junior-high-school kids who come to Plugged In three nights a week to work on their own magazine have tackled sensitive issues like race -- by learning what it means to work with someone who comes from a different background.
"They've had to negotiate a lot of issues," says Bolding. "Working through those issues builds confidence in themselves."
"We need to demonstrate that technology can be a leveler," says Decrem. "Plugged In is trying to make sure that good things come out of this. If we do the job right, we'll prove that technology can be a positive force in society."
"This is a way to provide people with real opportunities. Here is a chance to give people a way to feed themselves."
Joseph Loeb has a dream -- a vision of justice for America's underprivileged communities, a quest rooted in the civil-rights activism of the 1960s. But Loeb, 46, has a contemporary take on community organizing. The tools of the Information Revolution power his ambitious agenda for social change.
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