Message from the President: Meeting the Moment: Clear Eyed and Committed
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
—Mary Oliver, “Don’t Hesitate,” Devotions
Everywhere you look, Spring is showing off. There’s the pair of California towhee who entertain me as they splash about in their morning bath while I sip my coffee. Front yards have gone a bit wild, spilling over the sidewalk with poppies and fragrant jasmine, a joyful jumble of both planted and wild beauties that delight my senses on evening walks with our pup. And everywhere, young people and their families are celebrating one of my favorite rites of Spring—graduation.
Sit for a minute with the photo featured at the top of this update, taken at the 2024 graduation of UCLA Community School. For me, it captures the joy, promise, and accomplishment of graduation, of a community collectively supporting and preparing a young person to step into their full and beautiful self. It represents the “why” behind the work we do.
Serving K–12 public school students in the heart of L.A., UCLA Community School demonstrates what’s possible when you organize school days and school structures with one central goal in mind: to support students to thrive. Earlier this year, staff and Board members from the Stuart Foundation had the honor of joining with educators, community partners, families, and students in celebrating the school’s quinceañera, or 15th birthday. During the evening program, graduates spoke of their powerful experiences as students. Joselyne Franco (’16) talked about the impact of having a mentor and close and supportive relationships. Alan Antonio (’18) reflected on encouragement and opportunities to explore ways to elevate his voice and advocate for his community. One after another, students credited courses, supports, and staff with preparing them to navigate transitions and find fulfillment and success in the world of work.
Listening, I was struck by how life-changing their school experience was for each of the students. They affirmed why here at the Stuart Foundation we are dedicated to adolescents and to reimagining public schools and school systems to support, engage, and educate them into a promise-filled future. Their stories also stirred something personal in me. I moved to the U.S. as an international student to attend law school and I remember well the mix of hope and uncertainty that comes with forging a path in a new place. Hearing these young people speak about the relationships, opportunities, and supports that helped them thrive affirmed the profound impact that caring, well-designed public schools can have on a young person’s trajectory.
Meeting the Moment
We are living in perilous times. Newspaper headlines and social media feeds provide a relentless drumbeat of the many ways in which the most vulnerable among us are increasingly at risk—of losing their healthcare, being separated from their families, and discovering that school-based staff and services, such as those provided by AmeriCorps workers, have suddenly and tragically vanished. It would be reasonable to ask why, amidst all the pain and disillusionment engendered by these times, I would start this update by reflecting on beauty, joy, and promise.
Regular readers to these Updates know that I am hard-wired for hope. I am also convinced that as much as we need to name and work to rectify injustices, we also need to allow ourselves and encourage young people to take in the beauty that is all around us, to celebrate the triumphs, and to revel in the joy of their accomplishments. A new photo essay on our website, UCLA Community School: Creating the Conditions for Thriving, does just that. Developed in partnership with CatchLight and documentary photographer Isadora Kosofsky, the feature shows what thriving looks and feels like through the experiences of three high school students: Kaelin, Sujana, and Javir.
As systems people, we know it is important to understand what undergirds that thriving. This includes a culture of belonging; support for the many needs of students and families (including an immigration law clinic to help community members understand their rights and navigate the legal system and a health center that offers mental health supports); and a long-term commitment to data and research to inform and improve educators’ practices. We also know that it isn’t enough to just tell people about these features. We need to show them in action and demonstrate the impact. We understand the power of examples to reignite belief and show what’s possible when public institutions are under threat. Have a look at it and let us know what you think!
Listening, Watching, Learning, Doing
Around the state, students, families, educators, and community and business partners are exploring how to do high school differently. Many are leveraging what we like to call the state’s “down payment” on adolescent learning—one-time public funds to support community schools, college and career pathways, and dual enrollment—to interrogate current high school practices and lean into promising new ones. They’re also creating opportunities for students to build essential skills while researching pressing issues in their school and community. The mechanisms for these efforts vary, but all share an underlying commitment to the role public education plays in helping young people unlock their purpose and build their civic muscle, in turn strengthening their communities and our larger democracy.
According to a November 2024 poll commissioned by All4Ed, California voters are supportive of many of these shifts in practices, including greater attention to career-connected learning, the opportunity to begin taking college classes in high school, and exploring new methods and approaches to support and assess student learning. Many outside of California are also exploring the need to reimagine high school, including in a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and the author, with Jenny Anderson, of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.
While we’re paying attention to emergent and promising conversations, we are also spending time with grantees and partners to understand how they’re navigating these volatile and uncertain times. In the K–12 education space, the work of researchers has been hit hard, with devastating cuts to funding for critical research projects and the collection of data. This disinvestment has profound consequences for student outcomes, undermining our shared understanding of where we have made progress, where gaps are growing or shrinking, and where additional work is needed to advance opportunity for all students. At the April meeting of the American Educational Research Association, we heard story after story of important work that has stalled due to federal funding cuts.
We’ve also heard from grantees across the many roles and organizations that comprise the state’s education ecosystem about how their work, their staff, and the lives of the young people and adults they work with have been upended. We’ve seen the impact that the increasingly polarized climate is having on hard-fought efforts to make school systems more just, kind, and welcoming places of learning. Amidst the turmoil, we are also seeing organizations meet the current moment with conviction, identifying new ways of working and partnering.
Like our grantees and partners, we are also adapting our practice to this new context. This includes partnering with other foundations in pooled efforts, offering communications capacity-building support, and, most recently, a decision by our Board of Directors to increase the Stuart Foundation’s 2025 grantmaking by 10%. We intend to use these additional funds to bolster the efforts of existing grantees working to continue and deepen their work to advance education justice in California.
Statement from the Stuart Foundation Board of Directors
For 40 years, the Stuart Foundation has dedicated its resources toward advancing the conditions in which all of California’s young people can live purposeful and successful lives.
While our programs and investments have evolved to meet changing needs and circumstances, the underlying values have remained constant, rooted in the vision of our founder, Elbridge A. Stuart. Shaped and guided by his Quaker roots and traditions, Elbridge was deeply committed to creating the conditions that would enable all young people to benefit from the opportunities that made his life full and meaningful. He believed that actions should be guided by courage, rather than fear, and that the efforts of individuals and public institutions should be rooted in values and informed by experience and knowledge. Nearly a century later, his words and vision continue to ring true.
Our work today reflects our fundamental belief that each young person should be able to develop essential knowledge and skills, experiment with constructively sharing their perspectives, and engage effectively with others, throughout high school and beyond. They also must be nurtured and supported to develop the sense of agency and self-worth that will enable them to persevere, despite life’s inevitable obstacles. We advance equitable systems so that opportunities to develop these essential skills are available to all young people, regardless of their personal circumstances. Our commitment is evidenced by decades of investments in grantee partners who work tirelessly on behalf of young people, including sustained efforts to ameliorate inequitable conditions in the child welfare and foster care systems in California and Washington state.
Above all else, we believe that a strong and equitable public education system is foundational to improving the possibilities for young people’s success and to a healthy and thriving democracy. Efforts to undermine public education or roll back policies that advance equality of opportunity in our communities destabilize the health and well-being of young people and weaken our republic.