Allies & Endorsers

The Big EQ Campaign is a fully independent non-profit organization founded by a few media-savvy business leaders guided by educators and nonprofit veterans highly knowledgeable about and instrumental in extending EQ-raising social-emotional learning in the education realm.

Neither the founders, the staff nor the advisers have financial ties to programs being marketed to schools by the numerous small companies and several university institutes and non-profit organizations that have created these programs.

To the contrary, each of our founders has been engaged in assisting youth development, including financially, for many years. Our  motivation is the elevation of schools and society to a new level.

The Campaign has been bolstered by a number of business, civic and non-profit leaders who have joined our advisory board and by others who, like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti  (our headquarter city) have endorse dthe Campaign publicly, as have many school, community and thought leaders in LA and elsewhere, including the LA Lakers basketball team, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and  Steven Zimmer, former president of the Los Angeles Unified District School Board (LAUSD), who has actively helped the campaign and has stated “We’ve needed an ally like the campaign for many years and thank you for creating one.”

Notable among national endorsers is Scarlett Lewis. whose son Jesse was among the 29 students shot to death at Sandy Hook. A former journalist, Scarlett researched the shooter’s history and concluded that had he experienced EQ learning in his school years, the massacre would not have taken place. Subsequently she became a national advocate for the learning in all schools and founded her own program, Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement.

From Scarlett: “I fully support the EQuip Our Kids! campaign because we need parents and the public to  get behind creating whole generations of children who won’t pick up a gun to deal with any resentments and hurts that their families, society or their schools are not otherwise teaching them how to move past. We need every school to include this learning because it is the path to truly safer schools and mentally and emotionally healthy children, along with many other benefits.”

We also collaborate closely with the U.S. Social-Emotional Learning Alliance, which is a network of stated-wide alliances such as the California Social-Emotional Learning Alliance (composed of scores of organizations and scores more individual advocates). Also in our own home state we ally with the California After School Network, After the Bell (the state’s largest after-school program), the LA Chamber of Commerce. LA’s Best and The Brotherhood Crusade are among dozens of other well-known endorsers.

Our organizing strategy is helped by the Massachusetts Social-Emotional Learning Alliance (sel4ma.org), which has been successful in advancing emotional intelligence learning adoption in that state.

Others endorsers include Nicholas Haan, former director of Global Grand Challenges; Shane Goldsmith, executive director of Liberty Hill Foundation; Albert Retana, president of Community Coalition; Dan Gilbert, project manager of the national Afterschool Alliance, and Dr. Lori Vollandt, former head of the social-emotional learning office for the LAUSD.

A representative quote from endorsers is that from Diego Arancibia, director of after-school support for the  Santa Clara County Office of Education:

“I want to commend The Big EQ Campaign for helping us educators by making the public aware of the tremendous benefits or social and emotional skills learning in our schools and after-school programs. In Santa Clara county we are devoted to giving each child a chance to excel in school and in life and we think this kind of education can be a major factor. The more the public knows and gets behind the movement, the faster we can add this crucial dimension to our education system.”