January 29 – February 4, 2001

40 Under 40
New York’s Rising Stars

By Miriam Krenin Souccar

ELISABETH STOCK, 32
Executive Director
Computers for Youth

On Elisabeth Stoick'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 divide, 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. An energetic young person who had an idea and capacity to make it happen,” Says Gara LaMarche, director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute.