Moving into our own building (1993-1994)

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 preservation of 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. Shortly afterward, we upgraded our Internet connection to ISDN (for a glossary of Internet terms, click "here").