Intro:

When Plugged In was created in the Fall of 1992, our goal was to build a computer center
where low-income children from East Palo Alto and neighboring areas would be able to use the equipment to strengthen basic skills. In our first year, two things happened which helped draw national attention to our work: in early 1993, East Palo Alto became nationally known as the homicide capital of the United States. A few months later, a group of graduate students at the University of Illinois published NCSA Mosaic, the software title that started the Internet craze. All of a sudden, people started looking at our program as a model for proving that the information revolution could benefit people of all backgrounds.

With support from the information technology industry, we were able to rapidly grow our program and broaden our programmatic offerings. Five years later, we are closing the first chapter in our organization's existence and developing the blue-print for our second organizational phase. This document is a biographical sketch of Plugged In. It is put together from information gathered through individual interviews with key staff, community and board members. Some of the staff were interviewed on camera. A tape version of these is available is VHS format. In some cases, the same people spoke off-camera to elaborate on specific points. The story is divided by year, each section illustrating the challenges we have faced as a start-up "social enterprise." Throughout the chapters, we have tried to articulate internal program and operations issues as well as our relationship to the community.

The Story

The Early Years 1990-1992 Written by Bart Decrem

I got involved with informal instructional uses of computers in May of 1990, when I started volunteering at Computers and You at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Computers & You was, and continues to be, a wonderful program that provides access to technology to families in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Once a week, I'd drive up to the city and help the students in this drop-in program. We might help a 10-year old kid make a card for her mother. A 7-year old might be playing a spelling game on the computer. I really enjoyed working with the children. Frankly, I must have gotten at least as much benefit out of my involvement there as any of the students.

I loved the affection that the children gave us, and the feeling of making a difference. In the Summer of 1990, I found out that there were some computers at a local Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park, which was much closer to where I lived. A couple of friends and myself started volunteering there and structuring a drop-in program. In a few months' time, we built up a program that was really successful. My friend (Bill Goetz) and myself would walk into the computer lab, open the doors, and kids would stream in and have a great time playing games, some of them educational - some just plain fun. At the end of the Summer, we decided to tighten up the program. For the next two years, I developed a somewhat structured program where 20 to 40 kids a day would come in to a computer lab, work on educational programs, earn "credit" and eventually graduate to the next level of the program. Our focus was on using computers to help elementary-school children develop basic skills such as math, reading and writing. We created yearbooks and hired local teenagers to help expand the program. We got some software and used computers donated. It was a great experience for everyone involved, and working at the computer lab beat grad school hands down.

At the end of my three-year graduate school program, I met the people at Echoing Green Foundation and received a two-year fellowship that allowed me to start what is now Plugged In. I received the fellowship in June of 1992 and started working right away, as part of a Summer Enrichment Academy offered by Center For A New Generation, a young non-profit organization in East Palo Alto, which was working out of a local school. That first Summer, the four of us working in the computer lab wanted to do something different. We came up with the idea of having teams of students use the advanced multimedia equipment that was available at the school to create cartoon animations, using Macromedia Director software. We also played with the idea of having the students create a digital video project, but the hardware and software just wasn't there yet. During that Summer, 9 groups of students worked on 9 different cartoon animations. The 45 students, between 11 and 13 years old, spent a lot of time on developing storyboards and managing their projects. For example, one student did nothing but manage the paperwork associated with one of the projects. It was a pretty tough Summer, and some of the projects were total disasters, but a few really great projects came out of it. In the Fall of 1992, we set up our offices at the Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park. For the next 12 months, a great team of volunteers, a teenage assistant and myself continued to offer basic-skills programs using computers but also developed a few team projects based on the pilot programs we ran at Center For A New Generation. By early 1993, it became clear to all of us that, although the basic skills program offered an important service, our team projects offered tremendous potential to complement the classroom education of our students. After we did a fairly straightforward team project called Escapes From The Zoo, some of the students involved in that project created their own magazine, Kidz Stuff. For the first time since I had worked at the computer lab, kids started taking initiative, started telling their own stories and started creating their own production teams. In the Fall of 1993, we moved into our space in East Palo Alto and hired a full-time program director.

A few months later, we were able to hire a full-time site manager and 3 part-time program staff. As we developed the organization, we focused increasingly on developing programs that use computer and electronic communications technologies to offer fairly open-ended learning experiences. It seemed to us that we had the opportunity to use technology in a much looser setting than in traditional educational settings, and to use it as a tool to connect people and create things. As we explored these options, it became increasingly clear that issues of diversity and multiculturalism and what foundations call "cultural competence" were hugely important. Also, we started developing partnerships with community-based agencies. At first, these partnerships presented a logical "service delivery model" (see CTC Manual Ch.2) for an organization with relatively few ties in the local community. At the same time we realized that, if we're serious about using technology to bring people together, and if we want to use technology to help meet the broad needs of students, we have to work in partnership with other groups.

Our Own Building

In the Fall of '93, we moved into the main building at 1923 University Avenue. For the first year, we shared a building with the East Palo Alto Historical and Agricultural Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservationof the city's history. We occupied the rear portion of the building and we kept most of the computers in the middle and back rooms. There was no sign on the outside of the building that advertised our name or what we did. Nationally, we had gained some publicity from participation in Silicon Valley trade shows and a global marketing campaign for Kodak. In East Palo Alto, only our partner groups and the neighborhood kids we worked with knew that we existed and what we did. The first year in the new building was hectic. Right away we devoted about half of our time to seeking out new partners and tightening up our curriculum. In the mornings, our first full-time Program Director (Dave Lenn) would visit local non-profit groups that worked with kids and laid the foundations for collaboration. In the afternoon, we would open our doors for service a few hours. On Fridays we were closed for planning and debrief. We partnered with The Children's Preservation Network, an after-school program, and taught easy, one-hour computer projects ("drop-in projects") to neighborhood kids. The children would work in small groups on storytelling projects using simple drawing software . Some of the projects were simple animations, others were elaborate stories based on cultural and social issues including children as main characters.

The students developed basic computer skills and learned to work as a team, developing and managing projects using storyboards and tracking charts. Almost at the same time, a new non-profit was formed and moved across the street from us: Free At Last. This organization started as an outpatient drug and alcohol recovery program that focused on adult recovery . Soon after Free At Last was established, they became our first partner for adult services. We worked with their clients once or twice a week. Our first projects were a series of newsletters dealing with the recovery process. Most of the material was developed by the clients themselves. They included original graphics and photographs, as well as written material (essays, poetry and testimonials). Our partnership with Free At Last would become one of our most stable and significant partnerships. Throughout the year, we added new partners and expanded our drop-in hours. During the day, we would work with adults, mostly staff from our partner organizations, who would come to use the lab and talk to us about the problems they were having with their computers. In some cases, they were hardware or software problems. Others involved setting up an administrative system such as a database. At the time, Bart was the only experienced technical person we had on board, and these questions came directly to him. We hired talented and creative staff, yet not all were trained to work with kids or teach computers. For several years, experience would be gained hands-on, live on the job. This approach yielded some glorious examples of how simple it is to demystify technology (like learning HTML, making and posting a web page in 5 minutes), and also some frustrating experiences for the instructors and their students.

It would take about three more years before we would begin designing a systematic approach to staff training and development. It has been an on-going struggle for the organization to hire instructors from the community with both teaching experience and technical skills. It has also been a struggle to balance the need to deliver services (and the time required to properly train staff and develop stable programs) against our funding realities. It is more difficult to fundraise for an already existing program than it is to find support for a new one ("see CTCNet Manual Ch.8 "Funding"). The first year in the new building went quickly. We grew our community partnerships to six. In the Summer of '94 we brought on board Muki, a member of the community and recent graduate from UC Santa Cruz (he had just obtained his BA in Anthropology). Muki was hired full-time to manage our site and also teach classes -- everybody taught back then. One month later, our Program Director left the organization to go back to graduate school. That was the Summer we began working with Families in Transition, an agency serving Latinos in the community. Jorge and Georgina Peraza (Georgina is a now a board member) taught family history projects and produced some amazing work using Macromedia Director- Jorge was a student at the San Francisco Academy of Art studying multimedia. The challenges that Muki experienced in his first six months on the job were characteristic of our start-up phase. In those months, Muki had to: learn work with kids, teach computers, manage community relations, cultivate partner groups, and manage our technical infrastructure (See CTCNet Manual Ch.4 "Staffing").

Most of Muki's technical skills were developed by watching Bart (who explains very fast) and by spending hours tinkering. To quote our former MIS Director: "...at Plugged In, if you want to learn how to do something, make sure it becomes a part of your job description." In December of '94, we started working on two elaborate digital video productions: one as part of Hackers University, the other with The Omega Youth Club. "Hacker's U" started as a C Programming class developed and taught entirely by volunteers at the Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park. Bill Goetz (founding board member) and some friends were interested in introducing teens to high-end programming concepts. "Hacker's U" later expanded its offerings to include digital video and HTML. The Omega Youth Club was run by a local community leader (Dee Uhila), and a volunteer. The club was made up of an extended family of teens ranging from 13 to 19, and some of their friends. The youth were fascinated by the technology. They produced a series of documentary interviews that dealt with social issues affecting East Palo Alto. The project (and partnership) was very successful- most of the students developed solid technical and production skills. However, the success of the program had a high cost for the students: the teens enjoyed being at Plugged In so much that they would come to the center directly from school and stay until closing time. By the end of the academic semester their grades had suffered- we had failed to enforce controls on the time the students were spending at Plugged In. The experience made us very sensitive to this issue and helped us re-design of our teen programs. We also set a "minimum grade" policy for teen staff. Also in December of '94, we hired our second full-time Program Director Hector Campos. Hector had been working in Chicago at an alternative high school.

He had almost no technical experience, but had worked at an alternative high school and was very interested in using the Internet as a medium for creative learning projects. In January of '95, we expanded and occupied the entire building.

Growing the Program

In the first six months of '95, we doubled our full-time staff, developed great teen programs and were open on weekends on a regular basis. We started teaching web based projects and implementing a new computer literacy curriculum. At the same time, we also experienced some new challenges- maintaining proper attendance in our adult evening classes and the children's drop-in program had become a struggle. Several factors were undermining the success of the drop-in program. The children's drop-in had been growing steadily and now there were always more kids than computers. Also, teens had started hanging out at the center and working on their projects during the afternoon hours-displacing the younger kids. We had to enforce a teen-free environment in the kids space and made sure to provide at least one adult staff person to work with the children. One year later, after we bought the PC lab, we found ourselves facing a similar predicament. The teens started using Plugged In to play computer games on the new, fast machines and almost entirely displaced the adults who would come during the evening to use the drop in center. For the Summer, we lined up a partnership with the city's Summer Recreation Program (we called it City Camp) and expanded our drop-in hours to include Fridays and we were no longer closed for all day staff discussions and planning. We had spent all year testing and refining our curriculum and preparing our infrastructure to accommodate the increased traffic. It was a great Summer. We worked with 80 children from City Camp and provided the neighborhood kids with more activities and projects than ever before (we purchased a Connectix "Quick Cam"and started experimenting with having the drop-in kids make their own web pages. We also increased our adult day classes and continued to work with a handful of teenagers.

In retrospect, it's hard to believe that we accomplished this with one lab (six MacintoshLC IIIs) and a handful of computers in the drop-in center. With the increased use of the equipment, technical problems grew in number and complexity. We spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting equipment and finding ways "around" problems- we became very good at finding alternatives to using a complete lab (six networked machines) to teach computer projects. Dave Panush (our Summer intern) was a tremendous help and also a constant source of good humor. His insight into our work was: "expect anything to happen, the computers will break down a lot. Be ready for a class with 17 students (instead of 8), be ready when groups arrive late, be ready if the kids are not picked up on time. Above all, be ready when the kids want to hug you because you are their computer teacher." This was also the Summer we stopped teaching our storytelling projects at The Boys and Girls Clubs. By the Spring of '95, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain the level and quality of service at the "remote" facilities. Focusing most of our attention on growing our services and managing our new building while disconnected from the day-to-day activities at the clubs made it difficult for us to coordinate our efforts. However, we continued offering the C Programming classes there through Hacker's U. In the Fall, we hired two additional staff (Public Allies) to support the expansion of the drop-in center hours and our new after school program (Community Kids). By December of '95, we increased our hours of operation from 12 to 70.

By 1996, Plugged In had gained an immense reputation nation wide for providing high-end multi-disciplinary experiences for children and teens. That Spring, we were flooded with requests from students across the country (and Europe) to intern with the organization. We were very excited about the possibility of having extra staff (for free) and be able to expand our services. We were looking for a couple of individuals with technical skills and experience working with children and teens. It turned out we hired eight. In the Summer of '95, we had worked with four East Palo Alto youth participating in the Youth Employment Program. The experience was hard on the staff and great for the kids. In '96, we were committed to doing it again- but with a safeguard that we hoped would make it easier on our staff: we would recruit teens we already knew. We hired 18. In the first few days of the Summer, concern grew about the ability of the interns and YEP to adjust to the cultural differences they were experiencing- we had not planned diversity workshops. By the second week, noise and space complaints grew.

It was clear that we would need additional space outside the main building to house the 25+ new "staff" we had brought on. We had leased the building next door at the beginning of the year (1921 University Ave.), but it was not set up for classes (we shared the front of the building with NFTE). We thought we could set up some computers, improvising a network and we would have a functional lab. In fact, we would train the kids to set up the equipment- it was a compelling idea. How we Improvised a Mac Lab We had a number of Macintosh SEs in storage which had been recently donated by a local company. Some of them didn't have hard drives and others had bad disk drives or almost no RAM. It would not be a simple matter to fast-track our students and have them learn to install, configure and troubleshoot hardware and software in one week (we needed the lab to teach the workshops and the workshops to put the lab together). There were a couple of youth with advanced technical skills; together with our most technical intern, they inventoried all the equipment and listed what could be recycled. We knew it would be chaotic to have teams "assist" the three techies in their work as an workshop activity. From the outside, the workshops looked like hang out sessions punctuated here and there with technical explanations. Yet within a few of days , most of the teens had helped to put together the machines and some of them had become techie novices. This was not an ideal lab- but it was networked! (the kids learned to set up a Local Talk network). By the end of the Summer, we had accomplished some amazing things. The YEP all learned a tremendous amount about computers. They produced an online comic, learned to teach and run the drop-in center and developed a great appreciation for the interns and each other. Many of the students are now part of Plugged In Enterprises, and have played a key role in expanding and improving the quality of our services. Our staff was exhausted.

Plugged In Enterprises For the first three years, Plugged In's primary focus had been to deliver free educational and computer access services to the local community. We accomplished this through classes, workshops and drop-in opportunities for individuals of all ages. In the third year, we began to explore options that could add value to our presence in the community beyond that of an educational and information resource. We became very interested in testing out a role as a business incubator and provider of for-fee technology and information services. In 1993, the Internet reached a significant point in its evolution (supporting a graphical interface) and within a couple of years, there was tremendous enthusiasm and demand for web pages from businesses and individuals. Almost at the same time, it became clear to us that some of our students had developed sufficient skills to produce this commercially viable product. We knew that employment opportunities for our students were scarce and that it would be difficult for them to find jobs were they could use their skills. That Spring, we responded by starting Plugged In Enterprises (PIE): a small, teen run information business that made web pages for paying clients. In the beginning, PIE was made up of a handful of teens (the youngest one being 12) and a supervisor to help them design a business plan and teach them the basics of marketing and customer service.

The teens were given a telephone/office area at Plugged In, some business cards and a good number of leads (Wired magazine had donated a full two-page spread to Plugged In and we included an ad for the business). Within a few weeks, PIE had more clients than it could absorb and the kids found themselves under a lot of stress meeting the demands of their paying clients. The first year was very challenging for the teens and the program staff. We didn't have sufficient resources to stabilize the office (the business was only open 12 hrs. a week). It would take another year and a couple of "big investors" to really develop the idea. In 1996, PIE would be re-launched. This time, it would be a large scale business incubation initiative with tremendous resources to back it up. It would also become a focus point for growing the organization.

This past year brought profound changes (and new challenges) to the organization. We grew from a small start-up program with a $450,000 budget and a little over 10 staff, to a $1M organization with 45 employees. We added two sites, and grew the general scope of our programs to include information businesses that made webpages and provided desktop publishing services, We also started work on Plug In, a teen channel on American Online. For several years, Plugged In had been almost doubling in size every 18 months. Until '95, this pattern of growth allowed for incremental changes to occur: in '93 it meant that we could afford a full-time Program Director, and move to our own space; in '94 we were able to hire a full-time Site Manager/Instructor and three part-time instructors. In 1995, we went into high gear. By November of '95 we had expanded our hours of operation from 12 to 70, hired two additional 3/4 time staff, a bookkeeper, an accountant, and added a second building- this was the beginning of the shift from running a "program" to building an "institution" and also a time for new and more difficult challenges.

In the Spring of 1996, it became clear that the organization was not adequately staffed to handle the increase demand on the administrative systems and technical/building infrastructure. We talked about hiring an MIS Director and creating the office of "Operations" to oversee these issues. At this time, we also started to re-visit our strategy for creating "revenue generating" programs- we were looking at ways to grow the organization and felt that the answer could be found in a new version of PIE. We already knew that there was strong support for entrepreneurial projects in the corporate and public sector. We had a "promise to fund" from an individual to cover the cost of hiring a Business Manager for Plugged In Enterprises. We applied for TIIAP '96, hoping to use this money to increase the resources for the project, but we were rejected. By late Summer, we received the donation to hire the Business Manager. In addition, we found ourselves looking to hire five new adult staff and would soon begin recruiting an additional 25 youth for PIE. The "to-dos" list was immense: it included setting up a new building and technical infrastructure, expanding our administrative and accounting capacity, developing a business and programmatic structure for PIE and redoubling our long-term fundraising efforts (our budget had become $950,000). The amount of work and complexity of the tasks put a lot of strain on the working relationships between managers. By the end of the year, both the Business Director for PIE and the Program Director left the organization. And yet, it was also an incredibly productive season. We had made great progress towards developing the new programs and services and had trained our new staff. Our management team was faced with the loss of two key members and providing continuity to their efforts. In December of '96 we hired a full-time Development Director. She would have a daunting challenge ahead of her (to help raise 1 million dollars to maintain the size and level of service of the organization). In January, we hired our current Program Director to oversee all of our program areas (including PIE). Later in the Spring, after the audit, our Operations Director transitioned to a new program and a new Director of Operations was brought on board.

The tremendous growth experienced in the past 12 months has enabled the organization to reach an "economy of scale" that has changed, fundamentally (and for the better) how we operate. It has: Enabled us to clearly separate administrative functions from programs. Allowed for the increase and focus of program resources to support program staff more effectively (through staff training, more intensive supervision, and age group specialization), Helped us more than double technical support resources to manage our technical infrastructure, Provided for more resources to adequately manage the site infrastructure, Helped develop a critical mass of managers with different perspectives and skills to further stabilize the "institution." Our growth was the direct result of receiving a very large one-time grant from The Federal Government. Throughout the Spring and Summer, we have struggled to secure sufficient funding to support the expansion we undertook during the '96-'97 fiscal year. Earlier this Summer we experienced our first real fiscal crisis and were forced to temporarily reduce our staff and hours of operation. Currently, we are in strategic planning mode and are taking a close look at the lessons we have learned. Throughout the years, we have been tremendously fortunate to have received the support of many key individuals, corporations and foundations in the area. We have also benefitted from visionary initiatives like the federally funded Commerce Department TIIAP program. However, the core of our good fortune has come from the support we have received from our community, our outstanding and dedicated staff, and all of those who have volunteered their time and talents to help build Plugged In.