Brentwood School

The Wasserman Foundation proudly supports the constant growth and evolution of Brentwood School, a vibrant and diverse community whose purpose is to promote personal and intellectual growth. The school provides challenging, engaging programs in a nurturing learning environment, devoting care and attention to every student. Embracing high standards of character, commitment, and achievement, Brentwood School encourages students to think critically and creatively and to act ethically.

Children’s Defense Fund

The Children’s Defense Fund’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. CDF provides a strong, effective voice for all the children of America who cannot vote, lobby, or speak for themselves. Particular attention is paid to the needs of poor and minority children and those with disabilities, encouraging preventive investment before they get sick or into trouble, drop out of school, or suffer family breakdown.

CDF began in 1973 and is a private, nonprofit organization supported only by foundation and corporate grants and individual donations.

Green Dot

Green Dot Public Schools is a non-profit organization that is leading the charge to transform public education in Los Angeles to a small-school model that is academically rigorous and successful in graduating college-bound students. Green Dot is achieving this mission by creating and operating small, high-achieving public charter high schools, helping parents effect change in their neighborhood schools, and working to push the Los Angeles Unified School District to adopt and implement a bold reform strategy to improve L.A.’s public schools. Green Dot envisions a public school system in L.A. made up of small, excellent schools that encourage and welcome parental involvement and opinions, support teacher creativity, and educate students at their highest and best levels—no matter what their background. The Wasserman Foundation gift supports the Jefferson Transformation Project, which aims to re-structure Jefferson High School into 5 small high schools based on the Green Dot model of Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools.

Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships

Beginning in Summer 2002, the Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships at Santa Clara University School of Law have been providing financial assistance to Santa Clara law students to fund public interest and social justice law summer positions. It is intended that students working in these positions will promote the public interest values that have characterized the work and career of Justice Stevens. Two Fellowships were awarded Summer 2004, each in the amount of $5,000. The Stevens Fellowships at Santa Clara are the second such program Skip Paul, who served as a law clerk to Justice Stevens, first at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and then at the United States Supreme Court, has created. In 1997 he established a program at Northwestern University School of Law, which is the school at which Justice Stevens obtained his law degree.

LA SCORES

LA SCORES is a five day per week after-school program that works to enrich the lives of Los Angeles’ urban youth through regular participation and skill building in creative writing, soccer, and community service.  Teamwork——a key to success both on and off the field——is the common denominator. Instructors work with 180 students on a consistent basis and impact another 1,000 through outreach programming with the Beyond the Bell Branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The program takes place every day after school for 1 and 1/2 hours and operates for 10 weeks in the fall and 10 weeks in the spring and currently serves students in grades 3-8.  In addition to these twenty weeks, the program also offers special events throughout the year, field trips, soccer clinics, and a six week summer program.

LA SCORES is a division of the national campaign, America SCORES, whose mission is to bring soccer and literacy to kids across the country.

Teach For America (Los Angeles Chapter)

Teach For America’s mission is to enlist our nation’s most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality. This is accomplished by building a diverse, highly selective national corps of outstanding recent college graduates—of all academic majors and career interests—who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools in our nation’s lowest-income communities and become lifelong leaders for expanding educational opportunity.

This year, a corps of more than 400 of the nation’s most promising future leaders are teaching in our city’s lowest-income classrooms as a part of Teach For America • Los Angeles. More than 80 percent of the students reached qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the overwhelming majority of the students (95 percent) are African-American or Latino. All of the districts served are classified as “high-need” local education agencies by the federal government.

By Fall 2007, over 5,000 corps members will be teaching all over the United States.