New Fund Exposes Charities to the Outer Limits of Technology

By ELIZABETH SCHWINN

In a Washington suburb, high-technology entrepreneurs Arthur

and Kathy Bushkin are building the Stargazer Foundation to help nonprofit groups use the Internet to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Started with $25-million from the Bushkins, Stargazer — which takes its name and inspiration from the long-running television show Star Trek — hopes to build what it calls a “Dot.Commons.” The concept is to provide not only a physical meeting place, but also a virtual space where nonprofit organizations can gather to chat, conduct research, use new tools, share ideas, and create innovative approaches to delivering services.

The centerpiece of the foundation is a 10,000-square-foot high-tech facility called the “Entrepreneurium,” complete with a “holodeck,” a “transporter,” and other fictional concepts based on Star Trek‘s vision of life in the 24th century.

The Bushkins say they expect to provide an additional $25-million to Stargazer over the next few years. What’s more, they hope to use their computer skills, experience, and contacts to help charities grow and develop as explosively as the dot-com world has.

Mr. Bushkin, a 57-year-old computer scientist and former Bell Atlantic executive, oversees the day-to-day work at the fund, an operating foundation that mainly runs its own programs. Ms. Bushkin, 51, is a senior vice president and chief communications officer at America Online, and works with her husband to develop the ideas that run Stargazer.

Sharing Space and Ideas

Any nonprofit group can take advantage of Stargazer’s facilities, and consult with its technology experts, at no charge. When charity executives visit Stargazer, they’re likely to find themselves sharing space with small start-up companies such as Com2001.com, a telecommunications company that the Bushkins are “incubating” — providing space and other assistance to get it started — or new nonprofit groups, such as the IT Community Foundation, a northern Virginia group that aims to bring the money and for-profit concepts of the technology industry to charities.

Mr. Bushkin believes blending people from start-up companies with officials of nonprofit groups offers a powerful way to encourage creativity at both types of organizations. To avoid endangering Stargazer’s tax-exempt status by working too closely with commercial organizations, the Bushkins also have formed the Stargazer Group, a for-profit entity that provides space and technical expertise to both nonprofit groups and for-profit companies. The foundation focuses on StargazerNet (http://www.stargazernet.net), the Web site the Bushkins are developing for nonprofit groups.

The Bushkins hope the for-profit company will be able to benefit charities in ways other than just providing a common meeting ground. The company is planning to establish venture-capital funds that will channel earnings directly to nonprofit groups.

The funds, called the Stargazer Charitable GiveBack Funds, will invest in venture-capital funds, thereby providing investors with access to venture-capital investments they might not otherwise be able to obtain. The funds are structured to allow investors to donate all or part of the profits directly to charity and get a tax write-off. In addition, venture-capital funds have agreed to allow the GiveBack Funds to invest “side by side” with them. Instead of the traditional practice, where investors have to pay substantial fees to participate in a venture-capital fund, the charitable funds will invest directly in the start-up companies chosen by the venture capitalists.

Much as the Bushkins are focusing most of their philanthropy on ways to encourage charities to take advantage of technology, they say they recognize that few advances can be made unless charities have sufficient resources to carry out their missions. “Capacity,” Mr. Bushkin observes, “never lives up to compassion.”

Early Stages

Stargazer, which began operations last year, is still in the beginning stages of helping charities navigate the often-bewildering array of technical options, and working with them to build Internet-based tools specifically designed to meet their needs. It is counting mightily on the Entrepreneurium to free nonprofit leaders from any mental or technical constraints they face as they think about new ways to use technology.

The first thing visitors to the Entrepreneurium see is a reception area that houses a prototype of a futuristic information kiosk where people can obtain access to information from anywhere. Such kiosks could eventually be found all over the world, and offer charities numerous opportunities to reach out to the public, says Mr. Bushkin.

Inside is a conference room that can double as a television studio or be the site for a coast-to-coast video or Web conference (or both simultaneously) for nonprofit groups, as well as a lecture hall with 49 laptops (the holodeck), each with its own separate high-speed Internet line. A flat-panel screen at the front of the room can display information from the laptops or other media.

The executive offices are not the flashiest part of the suite but almost an afterthought, wrapping around focal points like the conference room and the big open workspace (the “transporter”) where start-ups are housed. The office telephone system can access e-mail messages and read them aloud.

Then there are fun things — a pair of robotic dogs and a coffee machine that brews 12 different varieties by the cup. Visitors are given silver pins to wear that resemble the communicator buttons worn on Star Trek. The lights in the ceiling form maps of constellations, accurate down to the degree of brightness in each star.

Seeking Ideas

Perhaps more important to the Bushkins’ ultimate success in spreading technology will be the virtual aspect of the Dot.Commons. The foundation’s StargazerNet will contain chat rooms, threaded discussions, reference materials, and links to other sites, among other features.

Stargazer hopes to encourage as many nonprofit groups as possible to contribute ideas for the site, but is getting many of its suggestions from about 30 nonprofit groups it works with regularly. Among the groups (called “Federation members,” another term borrowed from the Star Trek lexicon) are America’s Promise, Teach for America, and the Nature Conservancy.

“We have to build a structure that allows others to help us,” says Mr. Bushkin. “This only works if we get a lot of people in a lot of roles all pulling in the same direction.”

To encourage suggestions, StargazerNet has a section called the Imaginarium where people can propose new roles for nonprofit groups. The Exploratorium is where site visitors can examine an array of resources provided by other groups, and look at how others have rated the usefulness of the materials.

More difficult to describe is the content that is not yet there. Mr. Bushkin predicts that StargazerNet eventually will encompass “a whole set of capabilities you couldn’t foresee.”

It’s necessarily a fuzzy concept: How would one have described a chat room before it existed? But Stargazer’s executives are game to try. On a wintry December day, Mr. Bushkin and a few of the staff members huddle cozily around the flat-panel screen in the conference room, their remarks jumping over each other as they show the prototype of their first product, a free interactive tool for teachers called Starquest. They see Starquest as an easy way for teachers, who may lack computer skills, to design Internet-based assignments for students, guide their research, and review the results, all using Stargazer’s site. Stargazer will compile the assignments on its site, eventually creating a huge database, and envisions a review system like Amazon.com’s reader-written book reviews, where teachers can recommend their favorite lessons and talk about what worked.

“They don’t have to go to school boards,” Mr. Bushkin says. “They don’t have to go through any group. This unleashes the creative power of the teacher.”

He believes the teacher tool is one of many applications that could help create “an explosion of productivity and innovation” at nonprofit organizations similar to that which changed the business landscape.

Turf Battles

Although education groups say Starquest could indeed provide a useful tool, the foundation is encountering some resistance from nonprofit groups that already provide lesson plans online — for a fee. Such turf battles that charities often wage to protect their image and revenue are likely to be a major obstacle that Starquest will have to overcome in all of its efforts, observers say.

“There’s a whole mental paradigm shift that needs to happen in the nonprofit world,” says Phil Ferrante-Roseberry, executive director of CompuMentor, a San Francisco charity that provides technological assistance to nonprofit organizations and schools. “Nonprofits are very proprietary about their information and about their data. That may be a little self-limiting.”

Ms. Bushkin says she hopes the foundation can indeed bring about such a shift. “There’s a lot of need in this arena,” she says. “It shouldn’t be seen as a competitive thing but a collaborative thing.”

Another big need that Stargazer may fill, some nonprofit leaders say, is providing unbiased expertise on technology. As more and more companies have been trying to peddle online wares to charities, many nonprofit leaders are finding it hard to figure out what is real and what is just hype.

In November, Stargazer held a seminar about distance learning, which ranges from televised classes to online education, to show charity officials an array of new technology and provide an analysis of what has already been put to use.

Karen Smith, executive director of TechCorps, a group that mobilizes technology experts to volunteer in public schools, says that the rapid pace of change makes it very useful “when a group like Stargazer comes in totally independent of any agenda and says, ‘We’re here to help. Let us find new technologies and keep you informed.’”

Removing Constraints

TechCorps, which is based in Maynard, Mass., also is getting help from Stargazer in designing Internet tools. TechCorps has put together information to assist volunteers in self-training and to walk schools through the process of seeking help, which Stargazer puts online in such a way that the information is easy to access. The question they’re helping TechCorps answer, Ms. Smith says, is “how do you use technology to break out of a box that has been confining you?

The Bushkins say they recognize that their foundation faces many hurdles as it seeks to encourage nonprofit groups to think as broadly as possible about the potential technology has to improve their operations. But they remain optimistic, so much so that they trademarked a phrase uttered by the captain of Star Trek‘s spaceship in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when the Enterprise prepared to set out on a new course: “Make it so.” Stargazer, the Bushkins hope, will allow more nonprofit groups to push the limits of what is possible and “make so” their wildest technology dreams.