History
CFY began with a meeting in the late 1990s of two New Yorkers—Dan Dolgin, a lawyer and private investor, and Elisabeth Stock, a former White House Fellow and MIT graduate. Independently, they had each become convinced that technology can play a transformative role in education, particularly in the lives of low-income students and their families.
The pair realized that a home computer introduced with the right wrap-around programming – including educational software, training, and technical support – could help families create more robust learning environments at home and teachers would be able take advantage of more learning time. Not only would it offer children an important tool for discovery and understanding, but it would also help parents become more effective learning partners in the process, and give teachers greater resources to expand learning within the classroom and to extend learning beyond the classroom.
Stock and Dolgin joined forces and began CFY’s operations in 1999, with Mr. Dolgin serving as its board chair and Ms. Stock serving as the Chief Executive Officer. In the fall of 2008, Mr. Dolgin stepped down as CFY’s chair, but remains an active member of the board. The board Chairmanship was transfered to Eric Gural, Executive Managing Director of the real estate company Newmark Knight Frank.
CFY has grown from serving a few hundred families the first year to over 17,000 families during the 2010-2011 year. Ms. Stock remains CEO of CFY, and has become increasingly recognized as an expert in transformative uses of education technology, recently giving a TedX talk at USC on the promise of digital learning, and providing a briefing to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Our accomplishments include:
1999-2000
- CFY launched as Computers for Youth
- Served first school in the South Bronx – 230 families served
2000-2001
- Replicated program in four NYC schools
- CEO named one of the 40 under 40 “rising stars” by Crain’s NY
2001-2002
- Doubled program to serve almost 1,000 families per year
- CEO asked to advise U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
2002-2003
- Family Learning Workshop redesigned to incorporate project-based learning
2004-2005
- 5,000th family reached
- Began distributing software on the CFY computer
- Student Software Team launched
2005-2006
- Philadelphia launched
- Education Executives Day launched
2006-2007
- 10,000th family reached
- Atlanta launched
- CEO nominated to NYC Broadband Committee
- ETS study released
- Affiliate Network launched
2007-2008
- 15,000th family reached
2008-2009
- San Francisco-Bay Area and Los Angeles launched
- Deals with Kaplan Tutoring and Dreambox Media inked for subscription learning services
2009-2010
- U.S. Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Adoption Program (BTOP) awarded CFY and partners grants totaling $23M to improve the home learning environment and increase broadband adoption in New York City and Los Angeles
- Meetings with the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission held
- 20,000th family reached
- MyHomeLearning.com launched
2010-2011
- CFY completes successful expansion to serve over 17,000 families in 100+ schools
- CFY program increases adoption rate of broadband among participating families from 45% to 90%.
- 40,000th family reached
- PowerMyLearning.com (formerly called MyHomeLearning.com) receives over 2 million pageviews in first 9 months with no advertising