November 30, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
By NICOLE WALLACE
Think Detroit combines balls and bats with bits and bytes to offer educational and athletic opportunities to the city’s children.
This year more than 1,400 children from ages 5 to 14 competed in baseball, basketball, soccer, and softball leagues organized by the Detroit charity.
Older children who have played on one of the teams are invited to take the charity’s four-week computer-training course. Graduates of the course receive reconditioned Pentium computers, complete with 56K modems and CD-ROM drives, so they can gain access to the Internet at home and share what they’ve learned with their families.
Michael F. Tenbusch, co-founder and chief executive officer of Think Detroit, estimates that organized athletic leagues reach, at most, 5 percent of the children in the city.
“What we’ve been able to do is create excitement for the sports,” he explains. “Now kids are just jumping to get into the leagues, and we’re using that excitement — and the credibility that we’ve built with them and with their parents — to expose them to the technology.”
The idea for Think Detroit came to Mr. Tenbusch and co-founder Daniel S. Varner while the two were lawyers fresh out of law school. The high-school and law-school classmates were discussing how to make Detroit a better city for young people.
Mr. Varner thought sports leagues were the key, but Mr. Tenbusch argued that what kids really needed were computers. Then they had what Mr. Tenbusch describes as a “eureka” moment, when they both realized the potential for combining athletics and technology.
The two met weekly for six months to develop a business plan, and then started the group on a shoestring budget with Mr. Tenbusch as the sole employee.
Both Mr. Varner and Mr. Tenbusch were getting married at the same time they were starting the organization, so they wrote to their friends and family members who were coming to the weddings to tell them about their idea and to ask for help.
The wedding appeal raised $9,000, which they used to start Think Detroit’s first baseball league. A similar letter to law-school classmates netted $7,000.
Mr. Tenbusch describes the first year as difficult, with many months going by when he didn’t see a paycheck. At the beginning of the second year, though, the group’s efforts were buoyed by a $30,000 stipend for Mr. Tenbusch from the Echoing Green Foundation, and a $40,000 grant from the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan the following year enabled Mr. Varner to become full-time director of the charity’s operations.
The fledgling organization turned the corner this past summer when the W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarded Think Detroit a $200,000 grant, and e-GM, an Internet unit of the General Motors Corporation, pledged $3-million over three years to the charity.
Currently the organization relies on volunteers and a part-time staff member to recondition the donated machines that graduates of the computer-training program receive. But, with part of the e-GM grant, Think Detroit is setting up six upgrade centers that will pursue the dual goals of recycling computers for Think Detroit athletes and offering instruction that will allow students to pass the A+ certification exam for computer-service technicians.
With the new grants, Think Detroit plans to offer its programs citywide, increase the number of students who complete the technology-training course from 20 students a month to 200, and build an organizational structure that could be copied in other cities.
For more information: Go to http://www.thinkdetroit.org.
