January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
The founder of Plugged In, a highly acclaimed computer-access program for the poor in East Palo Alto, Cal., is no computer fanatic.
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Bart Decrem, 31, is a self-described computer layman and a graduate of Stanford Law School who has never held a high-technology job or spent late nights surfing the Internet. Even so, the native of Belgium became the founder of a non-profit group that was among the first to see a need to provide low-income people with free access to computers and the Internet — in part because he wanted to find a way to thank an American neighborhood he loved.
Plugged In, founded in 1992, provides computer services to East Palo Alto residents of all ages. Young children can participate in an after-school tutoring program where they learn computer skills and are allowed free time to play with the machines. Teen-agers can enroll in Plugged In Enterprises, which trains them to develop Web sites and then employs them in a business that sells Web design services and pays the youngsters about $10 an hour. And adults may use the drop-in center, where for a $1 daily fee they can use computers and the Internet for their own purposes, whether searching for jobs or writing electronic-mail messages to distant relatives.
Mr. Decrem says he wants his charity to help people who are already disadvantaged by poverty from dropping further behind in the computer age. Instead, he hopes that by teaching the poor to use computers and to benefit from their innovations, such as searching for jobs, they will leap forward.
“We’re in the middle of this information-technology revolution,” he says. “When you’re at a time like that, it’s like the moment of discontinuity in history where for a short period of time everything is possible. There are all these possibilities and this chaos. How can we take advantage of this special moment in history and do something positive with it?”
The idea for Plugged In began to brew in Mr. Decrem’s mind in 1990, a year after he began law classes.
To break the monotony of his academic routine, Mr. Decrem began volunteering for Computers & You, one of the very earliest tutoring and computer-access programs created by the computer entrepreneur David Bunnell and run by Glide Memorial Church, in San Francisco.
“It was striking to me,” recalls Mr. Decrem. “While the kids didn’t want to do their homework, they did want to play these computer games that were educational.”
About the same time, Mr. Decrem moved into an apartment in East Palo Alto, a poor area that has one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the United States. Mr. Decrem, who was raised in an affluent suburb of Brussels, lived next door to a liquor store where during one week a murder occurred every night. While he was horrified by the violence, he says he grew to deeply admire East Palo Alto’s “sense of community.”
“When you move into East Palo Alto, all of a sudden you start knowing your neighbors and people drop by your house,” he says. “Everyone knows you. There’s this sense of connection and everyone looking out for each other that’s very powerful.”
Mr. Decrem resolved to eschew high-paying corporate jobs after law school, and instead give something back to the residents of East Palo Alto. Setting up a computer program, like the one at Glide Memorial, was especially appealing. “Here we were so close to the heart of Silicon Valley, yet people really didn’t have access to computers and were cut off from the things that were going on just a couple of miles over,” he recalls thinking.
When Plugged In began, Mr. Decrem says he knew of two other such charities, including Computers & You, doing similar work. Today, Plugged In is part of the Community Technology Centers Network, which has about 300 non-profit groups as members.
As a pioneer, Plugged In has attracted visitors from around the world, including U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard, a group of French diplomats, and the Argentinian minister of communications. Last year, Mr. Decrem says 75 groups toured Plugged In.
The time demands from inquirers have grown so great that Mr. Decrem is scaling back the number of visitors and callers he will take. “We want to put 90 per cent at least into running Plugged In.”
Mr. Decrem has also been approached by several foundations that want to transform Plugged In into a national franchise with chapters in other cities and towns.
In an unusual move for a non-profit group, Mr. Decrem has turned down all offers so far. He says he wants to first perfect Plugged In and then, in perhaps a year, take on a new direction.
He is considering several options: making it a national franchise, turning it into an international franchise, or keeping it local but expanding its work to include lobbying for better computer access for the poor in America and overseas.
For the time being, Mr. Decrem has taken another unusual step: publishing an extremely detailed history of how Plugged In was set up on its World-Wide Web site (http://www.pluggedin.org). In over 10 pages of text, Mr. Decrem writes, with surprising candor, about all the mistakes he has made in each year of Plugged In’s life, including how overwhelmed the organization became in 1997 when its budget reached $1-million and it needed to scale back. Today, its annual budget is $500,000.
Mr. Decrem says he took the step to publicly share the good and the bad in the hope that it can help others do a better job of providing computer access to people who need it.
“I don’t necessarily believe that technology is going to inherently make the world a better place or that it’s inherently going to create opportunity,” he says. “But I think it has that potential. Our job is to kind of actualize that.”
