Young Storytellers Creates Jamie Tarses Fund for Student Writers

Young Storytellers has established the Jamie Tarses Fund, a tribute to the late television executive that will support the nonprofit’s writing-development work with students in Los Angeles public schools.

The fund honors Jamie Tarses, the former NBC and ABC executive who died in 2021 at age 56. Tarses was involved with Young Storytellers in its early years and joined the organization’s board in 2003. Her career and her relationship with the nonprofit intersected around a straightforward but consequential idea: young writers benefit when adults treat their work, imagination and voice as meaningful.

The new fund is being formally introduced during this year’s The Biggest Show, Young Storytellers’ annual fundraiser at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. The event presents performances of selected stories developed through the organization’s school programs, putting student-written work before a live audience through actors’ readings.

A memorial fund tied directly to student programs

Rather than being framed as a separate initiative with a narrowly defined project, the Jamie Tarses Fund is intended to finance Young Storytellers’ activities. Contributions will therefore support the nonprofit’s core model: pairing students with mentors to develop short stories, then bringing those stories to the stage at the end of a school program.

That structure matters. A writing program is not simply a matter of asking students to complete a piece of work. Young Storytellers combines one-to-one or small-scale mentorship, drafting and revision, and an eventual public presentation. In practical terms, the performance element gives the finished story an audience beyond the student and mentor. It turns writing into something that can be heard, shared and celebrated.

Young Storytellers works with elementary, middle-school and high-school students. Its mentors include volunteers from the entertainment business as well as people with writing experience in other fields. During 2025, the organization worked with 786 volunteers, who mentored more than 440 students each week at 39 Los Angeles public schools and after-school sites.

Those figures illustrate the scale of the operation that the fund is meant to sustain. The organization began in 1997 with one program at Playa del Rey Elementary School. It now coordinates volunteers, students and sites across a much wider network, while retaining its central focus on helping young people build stories of their own.

Jamie Tarses’ connection to mentorship

Tarses was a major creative executive whose rise through NBC led to her recruitment by ABC, where she became the first woman to lead entertainment at a Big Three broadcast network. The historical significance of that appointment sits alongside the personal dimension emphasized by those close to her: a reputation for helping writers articulate and develop their ideas.

Her brother, writer-producer Matt Tarses, described the choice to create the fund as an obvious way to preserve that commitment. He said she was happiest when assisting writers with their stories, and recalled that she encouraged relatives to volunteer with Young Storytellers. What began as her prompt to get involved became, in his description, a joyful and rewarding commitment for the family.

“Jamie was never happier than when she was helping writers tell their stories,” Matt Tarses said. “She had a gift for it and everyone who worked with her benefited tremendously from her guidance.”

That is a useful lens for the fund’s purpose. It does not seek to canonize a career only through titles or executive milestones. It instead directs resources into a setting where creative guidance is the point: students receive focused attention, are encouraged to make choices in their writing, and see the resulting work treated as worth performing.

Why the program model is significant

Mentorship can be an elastic term, so it is worth being precise about what it means in this context. A mentor is not presented as someone who takes ownership of a student’s story or supplies a professional-standard script on the student’s behalf. The program pairs a volunteer with a student as the student develops a short story. The culminating stage performance then centers the young writer’s work.

The distinction is important because the value is not limited to a polished final product. The process recognizes that ideas have value before they are fully formed. Students can learn that a premise can be expanded, a character can be clarified, and a draft can change without losing the writer’s perspective. An actor performing the finished story provides a visible sign that the work has moved from a private exercise into a shared creative experience.

Jaylene Benggon Chung, Young Storytellers’ managing director, connected that philosophy directly to Tarses’ legacy. Chung said Tarses understood the power of telling young people that their ideas deserved serious attention, and that this belief remains central to the organization’s work.

“Because of this fund, the kids who come through our doors will keep feeling her generosity, whether or not they ever learn her name,” Chung said.

That statement also captures how memorial funds can work most effectively in an educational nonprofit setting. The name attached to the fund preserves the story of the person being honored, while the practical benefit reaches students through programming rather than through a one-time symbolic gesture. The focus remains on access to creative support.

A changing leadership moment for Young Storytellers

The fund’s debut arrives during another organizational transition. Young Storytellers has selected Kevin Bolling as its new executive director. Bolling previously worked for the Secular Student Alliance and, before that, led fundraising for the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.

For an organization built around sustained partnerships among schools, students and volunteers, leadership and fundraising are not merely administrative concerns. They affect the ability to maintain programs across numerous sites and to support the people making those programs possible. The Tarses Fund adds a dedicated channel for people who want to support that mission in her memory, while Bolling takes on the broader executive role.

The announcement also arrives amid ongoing attention to the people and institutions that shape storytelling beyond the screen. Entertainment-industry news often focuses on productions, talent deals and corporate decisions; related coverage, such as recent reporting on a cancelled screen project, can underline how much public conversation centers on what does or does not get made. Young Storytellers operates earlier in the creative pipeline, giving students room to develop the confidence and language to make something in the first place.

There is no claim that every participant will pursue a career in film, television or publishing, nor does the program need to make one. Its stated work is broader: supporting young writers as they develop stories. The involvement of entertainment professionals offers students contact with people experienced in storytelling, but the immediate outcome is the student’s opportunity to create and be heard.

How supporters can take part

Donations to the Jamie Tarses Fund can be made through Young Storytellers’ website. The contributions will fund the organization’s activities, including the mentor-and-student programs that end in staged presentations of young writers’ stories.

For supporters, the fund offers a direct connection between Tarses’ legacy and an established Los Angeles educational arts program. For students, its impact is intended to be more immediate: time with a mentor, an opportunity to shape a story, and the experience of seeing an idea taken seriously enough to be performed for others.