By Peter Key, Staff Writer

A nonprofit that provides computers with educational software to the families of impoverished middle school students has opened an office in Philadelphia.

The office, which is the first Computers for Youth has opened outside its home base of New York, gave away more than 400 computers to students at three Philadelphia schools in the last school year.

It hopes to give away 1,300 computers in the upcoming school year, which means it will need “many more than 1,300 computers,” for spare parts and the like, said Keisha Jordan, the executive director of Computers for Youth – Philadelphia.

“We really are looking for businesses to partner with at this time,” Jordan said.

So far, it has one—Keystone Mercy Health Plan, which has pledged to give it 200 computers to refurbish and provide to students at the Luis Munoz-Marin School in North Philadelphia.

Tonya Moody, Keystone Mercy’s associate vice president of heath promotion and program development, said the Philadelphia-based health plan had been working with schools in the communities it serves when it was approached by Computers for Youth.

Since Keystone Mercy was upgrading its computer systems, it knew it would have some computers it wouldn’t be using any more. It decided to donate them to Computers for Youth to give to students at the Munoz-Marin School, where it recently built a playground.

“Because we were working with developing our communities and because we have a scholarship program here and we’re very big on education, we thought it would be a great idea to assist them with helping children,” Moody said.

Computers for Youth was founded in 1999 by its president, Elisabeth Stock, and Dan Dolgin, who chairs its board of directors. The two became convinced that owning a computer and knowing how to use it were necessary to participate fully in society. They also realized that there was a ready stock of computers available to give to families who can’t afford them, since businesses upgrade their machine every few years.

Since its inception, Computers for Youth has given 10,000 computers to students in 20 schools in New York and Philadelphia. When it gets a computer from a business, it wipes the machine’s hard drive, refurbishes it, and loads it with 13 different software packages, including StarOffice and some educational software.

In addition to providing students with computers, Computers for Youth provides them and their families with a half-day training on the machines and dial-up Internet access through America Online for a year.

Its standards change over time, but Computers for Youth is currently only accepting machines with a Pentium III processor that run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000 and have a color monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD ROM drive, modem, network interface card, floppy drive and sound card.

Businesses interested in donating computers should send an e-mail to donations@cfy.org.