Participants often work in teams, overcoming differences in language, culture and socioeconomic status. Your company or organization should be sponsoring ThinkQuest scholarships. The way adults communicate with kids in order to achieve the goals of education must be revolutionized. A great example of how to do this is Whyville from the California Institute of Technology. Whyville teaches kids how to be scientists by doing real experiments instead of reading about what other people did.
Kids form a natural community over the Net as they learn to plan and realize goals.
None of the above initiatives are handouts. They're investments that will increase wealth for us all. The problem with pre-digital industries was that they had only a finite demand for labor. Once a factory produced as much of a product as was in demand, it had no need to produce more. This resulted in pernicious, repeated obsolescence of labor forces as technologies changed, and the resultant unemployment destabilized industrial economies for most of this century.