Partnership CEO Joan Sullivan will participate in panel discussion and Barbara Dalio, Co-Founder and Director of the Dalio Foundation will also speak at March 19 event

March 11, 2019 – Melanie Lundquist, an activist philanthropist who alongside her husband Richard has pledged more than $300 million over the last decade to support education and health-related causes in California, will headline Bloomberg Live’s “Rebuilding Public Education: Learn, Lead, Innovate,” event on March 19 at the organization’s New York headquarters. The event, which will be streamed live, is sponsored by the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools and will bring together more than 100 public education leaders, philanthropists, and education technology innovators.

Lundquist will kick off the event with a fireside chat interview with Bloomberg’s Romaine Bostick at 9:15 am Eastern Standard Time to discuss her philosophy around education philanthropy, centered around her experience as co-founder and vice chair of the Board of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which serves approximately 14,000 students at 18 high-need schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. She will also appear on Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio later that day.

Since its founding 11 years ago, the Partnership has more than doubled graduation rates and tripled acceptances to four-year colleges in the five high schools it works with. From 2015 to 2018, students in the Partnership network meeting or exceeding standards in Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Math grew by 9 percentage points and in SBAC English Language Arts by 15 percentage points.

Also during the event, Joan Sullivan, the Partnership’s CEO, will be participating in a panel discussion focusing on public education transformation with Jesse Draper, the founder of Halogen Ventures; John White, Louisiana Superintendent of Education; and Donald Bossi, president of FIRST.

The event will conclude with Bloomberg TV anchor David Westin’s interview with Barbara Dalio, Co-founder and Director of the Dalio Foundation, on how to close opportunity gaps in public education and help students who are struggling to complete high school to stay on track and earn their degrees.

“The Partnership offers a proven blueprint for capacity building, scalability and sustainability in historically underserved urban K-12 schools,” said Lundquist. “I look forward to sharing the Partnership’s results while also collaborating with other change makers so that together we can discuss how to improve academic outcomes for our nation’s most deserving public school students.”

About the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools

Launched in 2007, the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools is a nonprofit organization that serves 14,000 students across 18 campuses in Watts, Boyle Heights and South Los Angeles, California. The Partnership is one of the largest in-district public school transformation organizations in the U.S. and its model combines the rigor and innovation of instructional leadership programs with authentic community partnerships and family engagement to transform district public schools and lead transformational system-wide reforms. As an in-district partner, the Partnership works within the Los Angeles Unified School District context, which includes honoring all collective bargaining agreements for its teachers.

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About Melanie and Richard Lundquist

Melanie and Richard Lundquist are among California’s most significant philanthropists. They have made the second-largest gift to America’s public schools ($85 million to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools) and the largest cumulative gift to a non-teaching/research hospital in the U.S. ($100 million to Torrance Memorial Medical Center). Last month, the Lundquists donated $70 million to the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Center, which will soon be renamed the Lundquist Institute. Continental Development Corporation, under the guidance of Richard Lundquist, is one of the South Bay’s most significant Class-A real estate owners and developers. He is a longtime civic advocate for the region, having recently led the fundraising effort to bring the first Olympic aquatics center to the region. Melanie and Richard are both Los Angeles-area natives, products of Los Angeles public schools and South Bay residents.