Company Taps Inner-City Web Talent

Ever since Nick Gleason spent a year in the early 1990s doing social work in Oakland, Cal., he has been determined to find a way to help poor people in the inner cities earn more money.

Mr. Gleason, 30, considered starting a charity. He had worked for Habitat for Humanity in Oakland and thought the non-profit group, which builds housing for low-income people, was very effective. But when he looked at charities involved in urban economic development, he was not as impressed.

“If you look at the track record of not-for-profit social-change organizations that have made a serious impact in the community,” he says, “the track record is not that strong.” He says that many efforts concentrated on housing but that “other areas of economic development, like business development, weren’t really happening often or happening well.”

Mr. Gleason, who has also worked as a foreign-policy analyst and a television journalist, took his social-service ambitions with him to Harvard Business School.

While there, he decided that what inner-city residents needed was not another charity, but a business that could employ them, pay them good wages, and give them a sense of self-worth.

So Mr. Gleason, along with Jim Picariello, an information-technology specialist who had been working for Harvard University, start ed CitySoft last spring, on the afternoon following Mr. Gleason’s graduation.

The company designs and maintains World-Wide Web sites for businesses and other organizations. It employs people from the inner city who have had difficulty finding jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

CitySoft seeks people who have taken computer-training courses and Web-design classes at non-profit centers or educational institutions in Boston. Since they run a business, not a charity, Mr. Gleason and Mr. Picariello want to avoid pouring resources into training employees. They capitalize instead on the work done by groups that already provide training.

To date, CitySoft has hired two full-time employees and pays each about $15 to $20 an hour, depending on the difficulty of the task. Their customers include The Boston Globe and ITT Sheraton’s Boston offices.

Mr. Gleason believes that CitySoft will eventually do far more for the poor than it could have as a charity — even one with a bigger staff and more resources.

If he and his partner had started a charity, they might have won grants or donations that they would not have had to pay back. But they both believe that in the long run, CitySoft will pay off.

“There is an enormous amount of Web work that needs to be done,” says Mr. Picariello.

Says Mr. Gleason: “If we were a non-profit doing activities which were nice and good and for the right reasons, but they weren’t central to our customers’ daily needs, we would be at the bottom of their agenda.

“By doing it this way and offering our customers a valuable service, we are able to say, ‘We’re going to give you a service that you need anyway.’ ”

He predicts that many companies will choose CitySoft over similar Web-page design companies because of CitySoft’s social mission. Mr. Gleason says he can tell corporate executives, “This is a way that you can also do the right thing that you want to do.”

A major drawback to running the business has been personal sacrifice. Mr. Gleason is working seven days a week; Mr. Picariello, six days. Each is drawing only a $30,000 annual salary before taxes — less than what their employees make. They cannot take more because the company must first pay back about $25,000 in loans from investors.

If they continue to win lucrative contracts, the two dream of one day running CitySoft offices in every major city.

The ultimate goal, Mr. Gleason says, is: “We want inner cities’ neighborhoods to be economically mainstream.”

He hopes that “business” and “high tech” will one day be associated in people’s minds with inner cities. Too often, he says, poor urban areas are associated with government and charity handouts, rather than business opportunities.