Activist Steve Snow the needy to the Net and to better lives

By Doug Bedell / Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News
Published 01-12-1999

INTERFACE

Five years ago, North Carolina journalist Steve Snow began a quixotic journey to link the Internet to the homeless and disadvantaged.

His call to action came in the simple realities of a rapidly expanding technological age: The corporate world and moneyed elite were leaping into the worldwide computer network. Disposable income gave them a huge advantage, and they could tap their networking engines to enormous benefit.

Nonprofits, do-gooders and poor should not be left behind, Mr. Snow decided.

Firmly convinced that communication is a primary human need, Mr. Snow began with the neighborhoods of Charlotte, N.C. Using private and governmental funding, he started to weave Charlotte's Web (www.charweb.org).

It started slowly. Mr. Snow and his confederates fashioned home pages and opened domains for nonprofit companies. They coalesced contacts.

Their efforts gained momentum. Using donations of computer equipment wrangled out of Charlotte's corporate world, Mr. Snow became a digital Johnny Appleseed. He planted computers in homeless shelters, nurtured workstations in community centers, wired up churches and taught computer skills to children whose parents could not afford a life online.

And the organization blossomed.

Today, Charlotte's Web is a multifaceted, broad-based organization manned by several hundred volunteers serving 4.5 million people. Its direct benefits are woven through 14 counties in two states.

Mr. Snow and his cadre are survivors in a nonprofit world littered with failures. With newly crafted business alliances - now Internet- sensitive and savvy - his network recently sprouted a wing that refurbishes computers, then redistributes them to the needy. Recently, the operation began shipping to foreign countries under agreements that seemed destined to expand.

Last month, Mr. Snow was a featured speaker at the Texas Community Network Conference in Austin. Doug Bedell of The Dallas Morning News caught up with the frenetic compu-organizer and tapped his vision of a truly democratic Internet.

DMN: You left newspapers after 25 pretty successful years as a writer and editor for dailies and magazines. Why did this move feel right?

MR. SNOW: It's a lot like newspapers. It's information and it' s community. A lot of newspapers have lost their connection to the community. What they do now is harvest markets, mine information, things like that, - rather than engage the community in a colloquy, a conversation.

DMN: But this is electronic. And so many people only see the commercial side of electronic networking. How do you explain to them that computers can also be a tool for solving deep-seated societal problems?

MR. SNOW: People at a younger and younger age feel less and less connected with society. Poverty is not an excuse for bad behavior. When kids at the age of 8, 9 and 10 are engaging increasingly in criminal activity, that's not just laziness. That's hopelessness. They don' t feel connected to anything. This kind of intervention by itself is not the Holy Grail. But it does start to create the possibility of hope.

DMN: For those teens, for example, how does Charlotte's Web help?

MR. SNOW: We go to community centers. We tell leaders, "If you have a telephone line, we'll install a workstation. You don't need to buy anything or get another phone line."

We set it up so these kids can come in after school and do the same thing your kids and my kids are doing. They unhook the business phone and log in to resources they never had before. All of a sudden, things get level for everybody. The kids can grow - just like their counterparts who have money and access at their homes.

DMN: Libraries across the country are already hooked up. They' re public. They're free and they're accessible to the homeless and anybody else. Where's the need? What's the point?

MR. SNOW: A lot of people who really need this connectivity don' t go to libraries. Maybe they can't get down there during the day. They might be working two menial jobs, trying to get ahead and better themselves and their families. They don't have access. Nor do their kids.

At shelters, the terminals are always open around the clock. People inside are teaching each other how to find lost family members and job opportunities. We do the same thing in churches. We go in and say, "You have an empty Sunday school class. We can put five or six computers in here."

It opens up new worlds.

DMN: Some people just don't take to computers well. They say, "It's all too complicated. I don't need this stuff. Life's complicated enough without those blasted machines." Surely, not every facet of disadvantaged society is appreciative of your offer of Internet access.

MR. SNOW: Well, we find reticence on the part of both adults and kids no matter what their backgrounds.

I define it like this: You're either in the electronic culture or you're not. If you're not, you don't use microwaves, cellular phones. Maybe you don't even use remote controls. If you're not in the electronic culture, you don't see any value, any benefit of getting people there.

DMN: How do the homeless use your resources?

MR. SNOW: When people realize they cannot only communicate with their neighbors more effectively, but they can also reach out to people in other parts of the country with ease...well, it's too simple to ignore. Before they couldn't do it. They felt powerless.

Think about these most-isolated people in society. Homeless people. Many have lost their way because they already had a hard time communicating with institutions and family.

Now, communicating gets easier using the Internet. And at the same time, they have access to jobs, training information, transit information. You know, we've had guys come to the homeless shelter, get information on the local community college, go there, work hard at an education and wind up at state universities. And now they're taxpaying citizens.

We aren't solely responsible for that, of course. But we're an enabling mechanism. We're providing an avenue for them to get back on the trail and start doing something.

DMN: Flexible access is key, isn't it? Flexible access to contacts and resources are essential for people in the lowest tier of society.

MR. SNOW: One of the powers of this whole technology is that you become owner of your time again. You're not subjected to the whims of other forces that say when you can do something: look for jobs, anything. Employment offices are only open 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. If you have a menial job, when are you supposed to look for another? What we do is aggregate a lot of content for them online and let them get access to take control of their own lives.

DMN: Your object, then, is to basically work yourself right out of a job, right?

MR. SNOW: Well, wouldn't that be nice? Right now it's all market for us. The fact is, few people do this. You look at the U.S., 70 million people use the Internet regularly. We're a nation of almost 300 million people. That's not critical mass in my book. If you go into the community's lower economic spectrum, nobody's doing this. It's under 10 percent.

So there's a tremendous growth opportunity. You know, the Internet is a million vertical markets. We take two. We take small governments. We take nonprofits. They have very similar needs. They don't have money. They don't have time. They don't have expertise in how to do these things. But they desperately need the communications tools and the applications. We can provide you with connectivity. We can support your network and help integrate your services.

DMN: Practically, how is that done? What are the nuts and bolts of Charlotte's Web?

MR. SNOW: For example, we have a program called the Electronic Neighborhood. We take computers donated to us, fix them up, add a printer and that sort of thing, provide 12 hours of customized training and then give the nonprofit group the equipment. And we guarantee them support. We say, "If anything goes wrong, we'll fix it or replace it for you."

We get lots of donated equipment. There's not a problem when it comes to money per se. There's not a problem when it comes to equipment. There's only a problem when it comes to will.

DMN: You provide contacts for jobs, but often that's not enough to get people into the door for interviews. What else can community networks do?

MR. SNOW: We're the digital traffic cop. A lot of our computer applications are driven by people who come to us and want to do specific things. They come to us and say, "We want to put our rsums on your network. How can we do that?"

We used to say, "We don't have a mechanism." They would say, " Why not?" And we would have to answer, "Well, no good reason."

Now we have rsums online. Instead of just providing content or helping to build Web sites, now we're doing office networking. We' re building computers for nonprofits, providing training for staff. Now we're starting to build applications for nonprofits so they can do their work better. As the technology moves, we'll just move along with it."

DMN: Your programs have been funded through private foundations and governments. But you insist that your work can best be done without constant tethers of their established structures.

How will you continue your work as a totally independent organization without some constant stream of income?

MR. SNOW: The idea of nonprofits as entrepreneurial is kind of new to nonprofits. Nonprofits think of themselves as spenders of money, not makers of money, when in fact almost any nonprofit has a product it can market to support its work. You just have to be creative enough to grab it.

You could do this as a commercial organization. The problem is, what happens to the missionary focus of the work? If market drives the mission - instead of mission driving the market - it's very easy to get caught up in the need to support the corporation and not pay attention to the market you got into business serving in the first place.

DMN: What's in store for Charlotte's Web in the next five years?

MR. SNOW: If you look at the evolution of technology, it's the price points that drive the technology. VCRs really took off when they got under $500. The same thing will happen with computers. When they're consistently under $500, they'll be all over the place. You' ll be picking them up on the side of the street. We'll take that stuff and make it so those people who don't have $500 can do it.

PHOTO(S): (Associated Press) Steve Snow, founder, Charlotte's
Web. CHART(S): (DMN) AD-Stripping Software.

© 1999 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved

©1998 The Dallas Morning News

 
 

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