Our Founders

Nadra Ostrom * Carmenita Helligar * Polly Stenberg

Nadra Ostrom

I am radically pro-kid. Growing up, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my life early on, but I knew education was important, and have always been passionate about helping kids. I almost went into teaching and ended up in educational publishing instead. I have tutored both children and adults, taught in summer and after school programs, and worked in marketing and sales. I have zig-zagged the country-- originally from Los Angeles, I moved to New York to attend New York University in 1992, lived in Miami, Florida, eventually returned to Southern California, and have been in Burbank since 2015. More

Carmenita and Destiny Helligar

I was born and raised in New Jersey. Later, I moved to Florida, married, had children and moved to California to raise our children.  When I look back on my life I realize the blessing of being surrounded by my grandparents, great grandparents, and amazingly a great great grandparent. I realize now that their traumas through some heinous and unspeakable events shaped who I am today.

My earliest memories are of freedom and travel. I knew only of my grandfather Joseph Maher’s love and protection. He was a hard-working Irish man. More

Polly Stenberg

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, I moved to Los Angeles in 2002 where I attended the University of Southern California and earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology. Southern California remains my home to this day. It is the land on which I became a mother. It is the land on which I have worked several careers, the land on which I became a ‘home-owner’ , and the land on which I have wrestled most deeply (among other things) with the legacy of European colonial power throughout U.S. history, White supremacy, Chattel Slavery, the institution of policing, Jim Crow laws, Native American genocide and ongoing systems of oppression, and other iterations of criminalization, dehumanization, hatred, bigotry and violence.

2020 was the year that I transformed what had been intermittent intellectual ‘wrestling’ and sporadic action, into a concerted effort to strategize and organize for justice, for the world I want to live in, for the world I want for our children, for the world I believe that humankind is capable of. More