Plugged In Enterprises: Good Deeds, Good Business

12/21/98

by Edward Piou

If you mention Stanford University or Palo Alto to most web workers, they'll know what you're talking about, and have a pretty positive vision of the place you're describing. Stanford alumni have founded some of the most successful Internet businesses around (Yahoo! and Excite, to name two), as well as more-established high technology companies (including Hewlett-Packard). Palo Alto is the pretty little city next to the university, flush with high-tech start-ups and their highly paid employees.

Mention their lesser-known neighbor, East Palo Alto, and chances are you'll either get a blank stare or a question about the homicide rate in the low-income, predominantly black city. ("Isn't that the per capita murder capital of the U.S.?") East Palo Alto isn't known as a hotbed of high-technology activity. But University Avenue, the road along which database programmers and venture capitalists walk in Palo Alto on their way to business meetings and power lunches, is the same road along which teenagers from East Palo Alto and other poor areas in the San Francisco Bay Area travel to get to Plugged In, a community center in East Palo Alto which offers them, and the residents of EPA, the use of computer workstations and Internet access.

Plugged In is not unique. It is one of many community centers across the nation that provide free or low-cost computer training and access to those who can't afford them. What is unique about Plugged In is the high-tech company which has developed alongside it. Plugged In Enterprises (PIE) is a combination of a web design company and a social services organization. For the past several years, while Plugged In and other community centers have been providing resources to the country's technology have-nots, Plugged In Enterprises has been teaching low-income kids how to create high-tech content themselves, and allowing them to use their newfound skills in a professional setting.

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