Plugged In Enterprises, Continued

PIE's Mission and History

Plugged In, the community center, was founded by Bart Decrem, a graduate of Stanford University Law School, in 1992. With some corporate funding and some philanthropic vision, he created a community center where residents of East Palo Alto could get computer and Internet access they would not be able to afford for themselves, and also get the training to use those tools efficiently.

Julian Lacey, who grew up in East Palo Alto and graduated with a computer science degree from San Jose State University, began volunteering at Plugged In in the mid 1990s. While teaching people how to use the center's computers, he worked with a number of local students on Street Net, an online project which allowed the teenagers in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park to communicate with teenagers at a similar community center in Chicago. Working with kids he recruited from Street Net and elsewhere, he restarted Plugged In Enterprises, which had existed briefly a few years earlier.

Initially, PIE's mission was to provide high-technology services in the areas of desktop publishing, multimedia creation, and web site creation to individuals and businesses. The team consisted of three teams of low-income kids, one in each of these areas, and one older business manager (Lacey) who would keep the business running and train the teens. Over the years, though, the company has focused more on the web design aspect of the business, and folded the other two teams into that team. This is both because they couldn't maintain a stable, large-enough group of kids to cover all three areas, and because the opportunities in the web development field over the past few years have been much greater than in the other areas.

In terms of recruiting, Plugged In Enterprises works today much as it did in the beginning. Every quarter, a small group of teenagers is shown how to work in a professional environment, use computers (both Macintosh and PC) and office equipment, and deal with customers. Of those students who go through this training, a few are asked to join Plugged In Enterprises and learn to actually produce web sites. Each month, these recruits are evaluated on how much they have learned and the work they have done, and, if the evaluations are positive, they continue to work for Plugged In Enterprises for a small hourly wage. To encourage learning, the workers receive a small raise each time they learn a new skill — like how to create animated gifs, how to program in Perl, and how to use Dynamic HTML.

The pay at Plugged In Enterprises is much lower than what you'd find at a typical web design shop. In addition to the regular expenses of a web business — advertising and connectivity, for example — the money the teens bring in through outside work has to pay for their own training time, teaching new recruits, their business manager's salary, and other expenses. They do get hardware and software donated to them by Silicon Valley companies, but the donations don't cover all their needs.

The main reward for working at PIE is not the money, but the knowledge and work experience gained. Even before making it through college, these kids have portfolios and job skills which will most likely get them further in the work world than what they're learning in school.

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