April 2001

Cash of the Titans

By Clive Thompson

[Michelle Boyers] wants me to meet New Profit’s newest prospective investment—Elisabeth Stock, founder of New York’s Computers for Youth, an organization that takes bulk gifts of computers from corporations, reconditions them, and give them to low-income families on a school-by-school basis."You just have to meet this woman," she gushes. "She's amazing. Just incredible, dynamic, a great leader with a great idea—exactly what we're looking for!"

On a cold Saturday morning, I head out to Harlem school, where the school's computer lab is crammed full of kids with their parents and guardians, all clicking away. Today, they’ll get six hours of Computers for Youth training on using software, sending email and surfing the Web. Then they'll take the computers home, for free.

Stock is a 32-year-old engineer and former White House fellow who figured out a while ago that computers in schools weren't enough; they had to be in kid’s homes too, and parents had to be involved. "That way it's good for the parents, too. It's something they do with their kids. It breaks down the barriers to technology, and it breaks down the barriers between them too," she says, leaning against a bench in the school's lab.

I can see why Boyers likes her. Stock has been running this for only two years, but she's already figured out innovative ways to measure her success with hard numbers. Last year, she surveyed the families that got computers and discovered several intriguing statistics, including that 75 percent used them for homework and that kids with non-English speaking parents used the computers slightly more than those with English-speaking parents.

She's running on a tight budget now—barely $350,000 for six staff in 2000, including the value of the donated computers. Stock hopes to triple that figure this year. The outfit's energy is incredible; they’re so hard-driving that her head of technology jokes that he falls asleep upright in the shower when he goes home after these daylong training sessions. A strong investment could really give a boost. In a few weeks, Boyers is hoping to convene a meeting with Stock and some of the New Profit’s dot-com donors, to suss out whether it’s a good "fit"—if Stock is willing, for example, to work with the Balanced Scorecard.

I ask Stock whether nonprofits should really emulate for-profits. She wonders, in return, whether that's the right question. "Most nonprofits already have to be pretty entrepreneurial just to start up!" she points out. And, she notes, running a nonprofit is always a chancy endeavor. "You risk going out of business that way too. I've known people who just burn out. You take chances either way."

I wandered into one of the training rooms, where an impossibly peppy instructor is giving the families a pop quiz on what they’ve learned. "What’s a 'link'? does anyone know what a 'link' is?" she calls out. A teenager in a hooded sweatshirt looks up from his keyboard, puts up his hand: "Yeah. That's something that holds the web together."