New Community Networks
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Wired for Change
Like many other projects described in this book, Plugged In, located in East Palo Alto, California, is difficult to pigeon-hole. Like other community networks described here, Plugged In uses computer technology to help address its primary mission of supporting the community. Their work is grounded in the belief that low-income communities are at a grave risk of being cut off from economic and other opportunities as new technologies increasingly become key to economic success and political participation. It helps develop educational programs and helps community residents develop their own stories, which are distributed electronically.
East Palo Alto has very little in common with its more affluent neighbor, Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. East Palo Alto's average family income is approximately one-third of Palo Alto's and its unemployment rate is 31 percent. Eighty-seven percent of children growing up in East Palo Alto qualify for free or reduced-cost school meals. Plugged In offers residents of the East Palo Alto Community a way to become comfortable and adept with the modern and often expensive high-technology equipment that they are unlikely to encounter ordinarily. Plugged In offers access to the technology through introductory workshops and on a drop-in basis. Plugged In also develops and offers a variety of after-school team programs for children, teenagers, and families. The projects are remarkably congruent with the educational values discussed in Chapter 3. These projects, including Alien Cows, Community Kids Storybook, and Sand Castle Kingdom, are done in groups, are multidisciplinary, help develop critical thinking skills, and facilitate the expansion of the students' world view. The student projects generally engage the "real world" in a critical way. For example, their Proposition 187 Slide Show, available on the Web, presents arguments that show a wide range of negative implications of the restrictive illegal alien bill that was recently passed by California voters. Participants in these programs also developed a critique of how the mass media - particularly the commercial media - portray and target low-income people.
I hope that this information is useful to you. Please feel free to send me (Doug Schuler) your questions, comments, and corrections. I will try to keep the information in these pages current.