'We Want to Link the Net to Real Places and Improve Communities'

In Mary McCormick's view, digital technology can't solve a single significant social problem. What it can do, however, is help people solve problems faster.

At the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY), the nonprofit group that McCormick runs, the number of Web-based applications being developed and deployed rivals the output of the it departments of most billion-dollar companies. One FCNY team is working on a sophisticated Web site, in both English and Spanish, that helps abused women navigate the civil-court system and obtain temporary orders of protection. Also in the works is a Web app that can help poor families -- 85% of whom lack legal representation -- fight evictions in court.

Another team is rolling out a system for a Casio handheld computer that enables citizens to conduct surveys of the streetscape in their neighborhood -- which means snapping digital pictures of graffiti and enumerating every broken streetlight and empty tree pit -- and create reports for the appropriate government agencies. An FCNY-devised database that tracks the progress of complaints related to human-rights violations not only is used by New York City and New York State but also has been put into service by the ombudsman's office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

FCNY was created in 1968 by the Ford Foundation with a simple -- and wildly broad -- mandate: to improve the quality of life and the responsiveness of government in New York City. McCormick says that today, roughly half of the Fund's projects are "built on the potential of technology to empower. The Internet can help us get out in front of some of the issues that we've struggled with: education, poverty, health, disenfranchisement."

FCNY's headquarters, on the top floor of an unassuming six-story building on the western edge of SoHo, serves as a kind of R&D center for New York City. Inside, a professional staff of 60 people works on programs that will help elderly diabetics better manage their condition or that will improve communication between at-risk new mothers and their nurses and social workers. The Fund's Nonprofit Computer Exchange and its Internet Academy annually conduct a full range of training courses for 4,000 staffers at city nonprofits, helping them learn to use the Web and develop and maintain their own sites.

Although McCormick is enthusiastic about all of the things that she'll be able to do when the latest FCNY project, E-CommunityConnect, starts bringing Internet access and relevant content to such low-income neighborhoods as Washington Heights and Red Hook, Brooklyn, she's also careful to remind her colleagues (and herself) that parachuting computers into neighborhoods that need them doesn't necessarily represent progress. "Technology is the least part of it," McCormick says. "We have to understand the needs and opportunities in these neighborhoods. Hooking up tenants to superintendents in a housing project could be a profound change. But if we want to make a difference, we have to understand the human issues."

The Makings of an Activist

From an early age, Mary McCormick intended to dedicate her life to public service. That commitment led her to work as a teacher, and to make a short foray into government before landing at FCNY. She grew up in a small town in western Nevada that was situated between a Naval air station and an Indian reservation. Her father was a research scientist at the University of Nevada, and her mother was a homemaker. In high school, McCormick participated in a political-science program that included a trip to the White House for tea with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.

At Radcliffe, McCormick was heavily influenced by reading Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age, a book about racism and socioeconomic discrimination in the Boston public schools in the 1960s. After college, she gravitated to New York, where she hoped to teach in a school in which she could make a difference. "At the time, New York City was advertising for teachers and social workers on the subway," McCormick recalls. She enrolled in an intensive teacher-training program at New York University. "I wanted to teach at the worst public school I could find," she says. She wound up at PS 63 in Brooklyn, a school with the third-lowest reading scores in the city.

"Yes, I was idealistic -- and arrogant," says McCormick, who has retained the former trait but has shed the latter one. "I got to teach kindergarten failures in the first grade. They'd been socially promoted. Half were Hispanic, half were African-American. I learned a tremendous amount." McCormick found a phonics-based technique for teaching reading that helped her students make significant progress. But the administrators at PS 63 didn't want to adopt her system, so McCormick went to work training other teachers as an employee of Open Court Publishing Co., the educational publisher that once marketed the phonics system.