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Keeping Kids in the Game
Why two high school pals decided to ditch their legal careers and devote themselves to bringing team sports and computers use basics to Detroit youngsters
By Bill Dow
It started over lunch. In the autumn of 1996, Mike Tenbusch was clerking for Federal Judge John Feikens and contemplating public interest law or the corporate sector. Dan Varner was employed at a labor law firm. Long before getting law degrees from the University of Michigan, the two had been classmates and friends at University of Detroit Jesuit High School. Over lunch at the Boardroom restaurant downtown, another law school ate remarked to them that she had chosen law to "make a difference."
Varner confessed that he really wanted to start a youth baseball league in the city. Tenbusch then pulled out from his coat pocket a New York Times article that described Americans feeding landfills with 12 million used computers a year while public schools could not afford the technology to prepare students for the 21st century. He wanted to start an organization that placed refurbished computers in the community. With that lunch-table exchange, both friends thought that maybe a career change beckoned.
Varner moved to the Federal Defender's Office in Detroit where he grew increasingly frustrated representing young people accused of serious federal crimes. "I realized that for me, the more effective way to help would be to prevent them from getting into trouble in the first place," Varner says.
Prevention, he thought, was really what he had witnessed growing up. "I had seen firsthand how team sports builds character, self-esteem, and a sense of community," Varner says.
Tenbusch remembered a wonderful childhood growing up in integrated Rosedale Park, "a neighborhood where sports was important and parents cared about their kids." He also saw tragedy firsthand "when some neighbors and friends in another part of town were murdered," he says. "The tragedies occurred so frequently that it never let me turn my focus away from wanting to make a difference when given the opportunity."
In 1997, Varner and Tenbusch established Think Detroit in a former Catholic school building at the corner of Warren and Trumbull. Tenbusch, 30, is the executive director while Varner, 30, acts as director of operations. With their legal careers abandoned, they're committed to the dual goal of empowering Detroit children with computers and strengthening character and family ties through team sports.
The organization attracts several hundred kids ages 5 through 14 to after-school baseball, basketball and soccer leagues sponsored by companies as varied as Third Avenue Hardware and Fred's Key Shop to Compuware and General Motors Acceptance Corp. The program works like this: Once the children participate in a sport, which for many has been as unfamiliar as computers, selected children age 10 and over are given a 20-hour computer training course. The cost is minimal. For a classroom fee of $25 they're taught everything from simple word processing to understanding computer components and utilizing the Internet.
Upon graduation, instead of receiving a diploma, each is given a refurbished Pentium computer to take home and keep from a stock donated by individuals and local companies. Two hundred students will complete the training this year.
In many cases, the computer graduates become teachers at home, showing older sibling and parents how to use the computer to create résumés, find jobs, housing and health information, and to participate in e-commerce.
The philosophy behind Think Detroit's "Balls and Bytes" programs is based upon a classic approach of sound body and sound mind, of building a community brick by brick, stone by stone. The next step for the Think Detroit organization is working to build "learning communities" throughout the city - clusters where neighbors get to know one another and their kids through sports, where the only hunger is one for knowledge.
"We want visitors to Detroit on any given weeknight seeing ball fields filled with kids, and anyone who talks to them hears someone intent on learning, with conversations not limited to wrestling and Pokémon," Tenbusch says.
According to a recent government report, Think Detroit's goals can't happen soon enough. The report concluded that. while much of this country's economic growth is due to Americans using the Internet for personal advancement, commerce and information, the so-called digital divide is widening between information-rich higher-income whites and lower-income minorities not plugged into the electronic economy.
In Detroit and elsewhere, community groups, with the assistance of corporations, are desperately trying to bridge that gap. In April, President Clinton announced that more than 400 companies and non-profit organizations have signed a national call-to-action to help bring computer opportunity to disadvantaged kids, families, and communities.
Surveys indicate that Americans recognize the need for such an effort. A recent Harvard poll showed that 45 percent of Americans are more likely to say computers widen the gap in income and opportunity between the haves and have-nots in society, while only 11 percent say computers narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged.
Technical equity has become a significant enough issue to earn its own popular culture nickname: tequity.
Tequity should be a basic human right, says Michael Kaufman, whose San Francisco-based non-profit Tequity Inc. focuses on understanding what it takes to realize tequity in our nation's neediest communities. "Before the onset of our Internet age, the poor and less-educated were already at a disadvantage in competing for information, higher education, and jobs," Kaufman says. "[It's] becoming an increasingly serious problem, because so much more is being moved onto the Internet."
To say that Tenbusch, Varner, their four staff members and more than 100 volunteers are having an impact on local tequity would be an understatement. Tenbusch says the effect is evident in the increasing number of corporations and foundations that want to be involved, and in the number of children who flock to their leagues and computer classes.
"On a personal level, every day we see and hear endless stories from coaches, computer trainers and parents who witness the smiles of children who found [the baseball] home plate or an informative homepage," Tenbusch says.
Recently, the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan awarded Think Detroit a $40,000 grant. Foundation Chairman Joseph L. Hudson Jr. gives high marks to Varner and Tenbusch. "Their program linking computer training with sports programs for inner-city youth had a strong appeal to us because sports is so universally of interest to youth, and computer literacy is absolutely critical for people to make their way in a rapidly emerging computer society," Hudson says.
Think Detroit's effort doesn't stop on the ball field or at the third-floor computer lab behind St. Dominic's Church across from the Wayne State football field. They are also helping eight schools in a 19-sqaure-mile empowerment zone running from the Ambassador Bridge to the New Center area. Their Technology Integration Project (TIP) is part of a coalition of projects throughout U.S. empowerment zones working to bring Internet connectivity and computer workstations into classrooms, as well as providing professional development opportunities for educators in the schools.
The need is clear. According to the National Center for Education statistics, a pronounced didgital gap divides U.S. schools. As of the fall of 1998, 39 percent of classrooms in poor schools were connected to the Internet compared to 74 percent in wealthier schools.
At Earhart Middle School in Southeast Detroit, award-winning instructor Larry Stackpoole's students successfully participate in Michigan State University's KLICK! (Kids Learning In Computer Klubhouses) program. Stackpoole turned to Think Detroit for assistance in training and refurbishing computers to bring technology into homes. The goal is for Think Detroit to provide technical resources and 25 computers a month for Earhart students and parents to refurbish, with half of the computers returning to the non-profit organizations for distribution.
It's easier to get computers than it is to get trainers, Stackpoole says. "You don't find people like Varner and Tenbusch every day. I can't find anyone else who has the vision and can move this to reality. They have done it," he says.
People sometimes ask Varner and Tenbusch, who both continue to coach teams and teach computer classes, if they ever envision returning to law and a higher paycheck. The answer is no.
"As a child, my mother taught me to thank God in my nightly prayers for five blessings that occurred that day," Tenbusch says. "I am amazed how quickly those five things come to my mind each night. I wish everyone could have the happiness that I have found.
"Perhaps I am being selfish, but in protracted litigation, you sometimes have to wait years before you hopefully reap rewards. At Think Detroit, I get immediate satisfaction on a daily basis."
Copyright 2000 Hour Detroit Magazine
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