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.
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.
The Plugged In Portfolio
A typical week at Plugged In Enterprises consists of a mix of developmental activities and actual paid work. In addition to visiting local high-tech companies like Macromedia and Wired, PIE sometimes hosts technologists who come in to teach the employees a particular skill. Recent visitors have given tutorials on Perl and Dreamweaver, and they're hoping to get some developers in to show them how to use Flash.
So far, the company has concentrated on the design aspect of website building, rather than programming, system administration, or marketing. They typically work on Pentium computers running Windows 95 and Power Mac 8500s, using programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. Their own website used to be hosted in-house, but they moved it off-site when an intruder broke into their server. Now, a local programmer hosts the Plugged In site on his own machine, which they have FTP access to.
Their paid web work has come from a variety of sources. They've worked on websites for a bank in Florida, an auto parts dealer, and also sub-contracted to do small portions of large websites for high-tech Silicon Valley companies. A lot of the contracts come from the good press that their company, and the community center, gets. Others come through the more typical networking and want-ad route through which many web companies and professionals find work.
Given their roots in the local community, it's not surprising that PIE maintains a number of community-oriented projects, as well. epa.net is a website that provides information on, and resources for, the East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park communities, including business directories and a history of East Palo Alto.
They also worked on the website for the Forever Young Foundation, an organization started by Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers to promote children's health and development, and of course the web site for the Plugged In community center. Both of these projects are aimed at helping less-powerful communities reap the benefits of the technology which is being developed down the road and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
A Model Community Center
With web design a growing field, and web design contracts continually coming in, Lacey expects Plugged In Enterprises to continue doing well. Just as the Plugged In community center has served as a model for other community centers around the country, Plugged In Enterprises may also serve as a model for high-tech businesses staffed by low-income kids elsewhere in the U.S.
This year, some of the older kids will be "graduating" from PIE and attending college. Perhaps when they join the working world four years from now, they'll be working at the other end of University Avenue. Or perhaps some of the people on the other end of University Avenue will be working for businesses based in East Palo Alto.
Are you using your Web skills for the good of your community? Tell us about it. Sign up some volunteers and promote your favorite cause in the discussion boards.
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