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August 13, 1997
Balls & Bytes
Combining home pages with home plates is giving city kids a sporting chance
By Kristen Palm
When former high school classmates Mike Tenbusch and Dan Varner decided to start an organization to help their community, they couldn't quite agree on s focus. Tenbusch wanted to recycle old computers, while Varner wanted to teach kids about sports.
But the two men wanted to work together. So earlier this year they decided to form an organization that incorporated both ideas. The sum of the two, which they named Think Detroit, Inc., may very well turn out to be greater than the whole of its parts.
Tenbusch got his inspiration from a New York Times article about nonprofit organizations that refurbish old computers and donate them to schools.
"Americans throw away more than 12 million computers each year, adding 600 million pounds of garbage and toxic waste to overburdened landfills," read the article. "Meanwhile, moist public schools cannot afford the electronic equipment they need to prepare their students for the 21st century."
Varner, on the other hand, wanted to introduce youth in the vicinity of the Jeffries Projects to sports such as baseball and soccer, which they had never had the opportunity to play.
The connection, really, was fairly obvious, explains Varner, president of the Think Detroit board of directors. "Sports requires patience," he explains. "It requires the ability to focus. Those are both things that you have to have when you're working on a computer."
"To me, the link is really the mentoring that can go on," adds Tenbusch, the organization's executive director. "With the athletics, you have the teamwork that's going on, the discipline of showing up for practices, of actually practicing and working out, the agony of defeat, working hard as a team."
The baseball league and computer recycling program they created have a symbiotic relationship. Through sports, kids learn teamwork and focusing skills they can apply in the classroom. And that's where the computers come in.
Volunteers for Think Detroit refurbish donated computers, which the organization then donates to schools, churches, nonprofit organizations and individuals. This provides kids not only the hardware but the know-how to operate it.
In October, when baseball season has ended and the Think Detroit soccer league is under way, 15 kids in the program will begin the organization's first one-month Internet course. Each student will be matched with a mentor and, when the course is completed, Think Detroit (the course's name) will give the student one of its best computers. The mentor will pay the child's Internet access fees for one year.
Students will be chosen for the computer courses based on interest, need, and initiative demonstrated on the playing field.
In many cases, explains Varner, the athletics will be the hook that turns kids on to the Internet.
In addition to the information on computers and the mission, the Think Detroit website will feature game highlights, where kids will see their name in lights.
Former high school athletes themselves, Varner and Tenbusch remember looking for their own names in the sports pages and the feeling of pride that accompanied finding them. "When I was their age I couldn't wait to get to church every week just to see if my name was in the church paper in the baseball highlights, and that was just the church paper," Tenbusch recalls. "Can you imagine on the Internet?"
And, they figure, the lure of cyberspace will take it from there. "We'll have hyperlinks to other interesting sites for these kids and it will just be a good way to get them hooked onto surfing the net, expanding their horizons, looking at the world through differently tinted glasses," says Varner.
And, appropriately, that's where sports comes in again.
Baseball, explains Varner, was just as foreign to most of these kids as computers are. When Think Detroit started, easily 80 percent of the kids in the league had never played baseball before.
But when Tenbusch grabbed a bat and glove and visited elementary schools around the Jeffries Projects, the Woodbridge District, the Cass Corridor, Core City and Corktown to drum up interest in the program, he found potential participants were not only willing but eager to learn the ins and outs of a game they never had the opportunity to play.
And their parents bent over backward to assist, initiating a schedule for providing refreshments at Friday night games.
With both parents an kids committed and enthused, Think Detroit has the essential components of a sound learning environment.
"Especially with baseball, in this neighborhood it's a completely new experience," observes Tenbusch. "The kids have just heard about it and they want to give it a try. I know it's been a rewarding experience for everybody, and I sure feel that computers are the same way. You can just get them fired up by the way you talk to them personally and get them to try a new challenge."
Think Detroit, says Varner, is based on the notions of social equity drilled into him and Tenbusch in their Jesuit education at University of Detroit High School.
Access to a computer, after all, is necessary not only to succeed in today's society, but to merely keep up.
Apart from benefiting the kids, the computers will help residents and businesses in one of Detroit's poorest areas to do more than just keep up. The nonprofits who receive refurbished computers from Think Detroit, for instance, can create well-presented letters and grant proposals. The low-income adults can run budgeting programs and design resumes. And the students can retrieve information in the same manner as their counterparts in wealthier school districts. To date, the organization has fixed about 20 computers, but wants to refurbish 500 by the end of the year.
"Access to information is critical. It's empowering. Just being able to find the information that you need or want to do something helps you do it, and that's half the battle," explains Varner.
"If a certain population in America is not learning basic computer skills, and it doesn't matter what they are - white or black, whatever - they're not getting an equal chance. They're not getting an equal opportunity. Part of the motivation for me was to do what I could to help Detroit kids who otherwise wouldn't have gotten it, get that opportunity and that chance."
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