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40 Under 40
New York’s Rising Stars
Jan.
29 – Feb. 4, 2001
ELISABETH STOCK, 32
Executive Director
ON ELISABETH STOCK’S OFFICE DOOR
hangs a photo of a smiling African-American boy carrying a huge box that
says, “Fragile, handle with care.”
In that box is a Pentium computer, one of 430 that
Computers for Youth has given away to inner-city middle school students
since its inception in February 1999.
With both
undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT and a patent under her
belt, Ms. Stock might have been expected
to start a dot-com.
Instead she started a
dot-org.
“The
challenges in the nonprofit sector
are just deeper; the problems are so much
more entrenched,” says Ms. Stock, who spent two years
after college in the Peace Corps
in Ghana.
Ms. Stock developed the idea
for CFY while serving as a White House fellow in the
vice president’s office in 1997.
Her
mission there was to place donated computers from corporations in schools.
But in order to truly bridge the digital di-
vide, Ms. Stock believed, low-income kids needed to
have computers in their home,
with an e-mail address and the training to go with it.
Since
then, she has raised more than $1 million from places like the Citigroup
Foun-dation and George Soros’ Open Society In-stitute, and convinced
Microsoft Corp. to of-fer up free software licenses. For now, CFY works only with schools in
the New York
area, but in a couple of years, Ms. Stock
plans to expand nationally.
“She is a
tremendously impressive
visionary. An
energetic young person who
had an idea and capacity to make it hap-
pen,” Says Gara LaMarche, director of U.S. programs
for the Open Society Institute.
—MIRIAM
KREININ SOUCCAR
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