They just have to go to central places (cafes, libraries). It's not easy. Also, not everything we do needs internet -- we tear apart and rebuild desktops -- that's actually a fairly easy thing to teach even a young kid.
Can you source a router and teach them to build their own internet over private LAN? There is a huge range of basic to one-day advanced things they could do with socket programming and building basic client/servers to have fun with. Then source some donations and build a neighbourhood mesh network.
Note: I'm a woman and started this way teaching myself C when young. Client/server tutorials were one of the most fun, I recall.
I'm not part of an organization -- it's mostly 1:1 with people I find through other volunteering (Big Brothers, talking at middle schools, etc). We wing it based on their interest.
I posted because PG said a YC non-profit was looking at this and wanted to say that if you want a kid to program at home, the issue is that they need access to the Internet (to get to a client/server tutorial, for example). His statement seemed to say that access to hardware was the problem, which in my experience, is not the case.
In my 1:1 cases, I can manage.
EDIT to add the footnote text from the article
Many kids now have computers with Internet access, but kids from poor families often don't. So to get them interested in programming you also have to solve the problem of hardware somehow. That is among the problems being attacked by one of the nonprofits in the current YC batch.
The problem of not having a "computer with Internet access" is not a "problem of hardware", it's the Internet part.
