Education Partnerships at the Haas Center
For nearly four decades, education programs at the Haas Center have connected Stanford students with local schools through tutoring, mentoring, and sustained community partnerships. What began in the mid-1980s with direct tutoring efforts in East Palo Alto evolved into a broad network of programs dedicated to advancing educational equity from early childhood through high school in multiple communities around Stanford. As the Haas Center marks its 40th anniversary, it celebrates the generations of students, educators, and community members brought together through these shared experiences of service.
Student volunteering programs
The foundation for education programs at the Haas Center was laid in 1986, when Stanford student Lorne Needle founded the East Palo Alto Stanford Summer Academy. His goal was to support East Palo Alto youth through academic enrichment and mentoring while building lasting relationships between Stanford and the local community. That same year, the Ravenswood Stanford Tutoring Program—now known as Ravenswood Reads—was established to help elementary students strengthen their reading and language skills.
Over the following decades, education-related service at the Haas Center grew to meet evolving community needs and student interest, becoming a flagship set of programs under the umbrella of Education Partnerships. As the programs matured, many became integrated with community-engaged learning courses, reinforcing the connection between public service and academic learning.
Community-engaged learning and research
More recently, the Haas Center has partnered with the Graduate School of Education (GSE) to offer dozens of community-engaged Cardinal Courses, which integrate academic learning with real-world experience. Last year, 779 students enrolled in education-related Cardinal Courses, working with more than 30 local organizations to address key regional priorities such as early literacy, learning differences, and youth mental health. Graduate students participated through the Graduate Public Service Fellowship, conducting community-driven research projects with local nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
Faculty are central to this effort. In addition to the many faculty who teach community-engaged education courses, GSE professors Farzana Adjah, Tom Dee, and Amado Padilla serve on the Haas Center’s Faculty Steering Committee, guiding connections between teaching and service. The Haas Center supports faculty through the Community Engaged Teaching (CET) Fellowship, which brings together instructors across disciplines and with varying levels of community engagement experience to form a community of practice. CET Fellows learn to integrate community-engaged principles and pedagogy into their Cardinal Courses, build reciprocal relationships with peers and community partners, and facilitate meaningful reflection and engagement among students. GSE faculty have leveraged this program to enhance their courses and strengthen community engagement.
Support for student service organizations
In 2023, the Haas Center partnered with Stanford Digital Education to help establish the Stanford chapter of Matriculate, a national organization that supports high-achieving, low-income high school students in navigating the college application process. Through virtual advising, Stanford undergraduates serve as mentors who provide guidance, resources, and encouragement to their mentees. The organization expands access to higher education while offering Stanford students a meaningful service and leadership experience.
There are many other student-led organizations at Stanford that give students an opportunity to engage in education-related service. These include Barrio Assistance, which provides weekly tutoring to K-12 students from Redwood City and East Palo Alto; Stanford Jail & Prison Education Project, an initiative that connects graduate students with incarcerated learners in Bay Area jails and prisons; and Stanford Science Olympiad, where students partner with local underserved schools to help create and coach Science Olympiad teams. The Haas Center offers advising, funding, and other resources to support these organizations.
Education Partnerships programs through the years
The Haas Center’s Education Partnerships programs offer students various levels of engagement. Each program has space for 20-60 tutors, who volunteer regularly to work with young learners in the community. Students who want deeper involvement can apply to be academic-year or summer Education Partnerships Fellows, and undertake further training in curriculum development and leadership. Many participants also take advantage of the programs’ eligibility for Community Service Work-Study.
East Palo Alto Stanford Academy (EPASA) was created to support middle school students from East Palo Alto through academic enrichment and mentorship, combining weekend tutoring during the school year with an intensive summer session focused on reading, writing, math, and leadership skills. Over nearly four decades, the program partnered with various schools near Stanford, most recently with KIPP Valiant Community Preparatory, a public charter school in Menlo Park. EPASA ran from 1986 to 2025.
Ravenswood Reads began in 1986 as the Ravenswood Stanford Tutoring Program, founded by students committed to improving literacy outcomes in East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. Professor Connie Juel was an early champion of the program, which pairs Stanford tutors with early elementary school students to foster reading confidence and language skills through consistent, one-on-one sessions, along with caregiver education. Students prepare for their service by taking EDUC 103A/203A: Tutoring: Seeing a Child through Literacy, taught by Professor Rebecca Silverman and Program Director Renee Scott. In response to pandemic needs, Ravenswood Reads provided summer school literacy support to students in East Palo Alto in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula, both online and in person when possible. These initiatives were studied by Dr. Silverman and the student teams who identified that, on average, youth participants avoided summer slide learning loss.
Between 2003 and 2006, Professor Guadalupe Valdés led Ravenswood English, a program that supported young English-language learners in developing oral proficiency. The program connected volunteers with children at Green Oaks Academy in East Palo Alto, where undergraduates served as tutors and graduate students evaluated instructional methods and developed a training manual.
Active from 2003 to 2020, Science in Service connected Stanford students with opportunities to make science more accessible, engaging, and meaningful for elementary and middle school students. Activities included hands-on experiments, demonstrations, and mentoring designed to encourage curiosity and engagement in science for underrepresented youth. The program helped Stanford students see science as both a field of study and a tool for community engagement.
Preschool Counts launched in 2013 in partnership with the GSE and Professor Deborah Stipek. The program engages Stanford students in helping local preschoolers build early numeracy skills through play-based activities, games, and conversation, emphasizing that every child is a capable mathematical thinker. The tutoring teams also provide family education events. Stanford students gain firsthand experience in early childhood education and development while, for families and teachers, the program provides extra support in the classroom. The preparatory class for tutors is EDUC 171: Engaging Young Children in Math, taught by Associate Professor Jennifer Osuna and Program Director Renee Scott.
From 2016 to 2025, the High School Support Initiative (HSSI) matched Stanford mentors with high schoolers in East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Redwood City to help them build study skills and navigate the path to college. The program fostered long-term relationships with many mentors working with the same students over multiple years to support both academic and social-emotional growth. Stanford participants gained a deeper understanding of educational equity and community partnership.
Before HSSI, the center supported the federally-funded Upward Bound program from the mid-1980s through 2007, providing academic enrichment and college preparation for first-generation and low-income youth. Stanford College Prep, a donor-funded program, continued this work from 2007 through 2012.
Video feature on Science in Service from 2016
The evolving landscape of Education Partnerships
The 2024–25 academic year marked the conclusion of two cornerstone programs, EPASA and HSSI. While their sunsetting marks the end of a chapter, it also signals the start of new approaches that carry forward the commitment, care, and mutual respect that have long defined Education Partnerships at the Haas Center.
Building on this strong foundation, the vision is to create a holistic education ecosystem that links campus initiatives with each other, with local nonprofits and government agencies, and with ongoing regional efforts to serve community partners more effectively. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with community partners and faculty and an analysis of the regional landscape, new pilots will focus on five core community priorities: early literacy and 8th grade math, the digital divide, absenteeism, youth mental health, and early childhood and afterschool care.
An education-focused place-based initiative will further align these efforts, coordinating Education Partnerships, Cardinal Courses, and community-based research across Stanford. Beginning in 2025-26, the Education Partnerships Fellowships program will expand to include two new research-focused fellowships, with future plans to add opportunities focused on governance, policy, and philanthropy. Partnerships are developing with Stanford groups such as the Public Scholarship Collaborative, working with GSE faculty including Professor Alfredo Artiles; the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities; and community organizations like StreetCode Academy. The goal is to connect the many strands of education work happening across Stanford and neighboring communities, aligning efforts to better serve communities, share resources, highlight the work happening in the region, and fill gaps collaboratively.
Farewell to EPASA
After almost 40 years, the East Palo Alto Stanford Academy (EPASA) program wrapped up its final session of programming this year. Through EPASA, Stanford students provided one-to-one weekend tutoring for local middle school youth during the school year and a five-week daily program in summer.
Initially known as the East Palo Alto Stanford Summer Academy, the program was founded by Lorne Needle, ’87, MBA ’92, then a Stanford undergrad, as a summer fellowship project. The program enabled a diverse group of seventh- and eighth-graders to learn in a structured, supportive, and academically enriching environment. Stanford students formed meaningful connections with the youth and each other, developed mentorship skills, and gained valuable insights into the larger social and policy issues affecting student performance in lower-income schools.
"EPASA has provided me the opportunity to be consistently involved in middle schoolers’ lives as a teacher and mentor in a way that few Stanford programs do, to tie our tutoring and teaching work to the bigger context of educational equity and other issues without losing sight of the youth as individuals, and to do the important work of building a genuinely caring and supportive community together."
– Emma Hartung, ’17
As we honor the history of education programs at the Haas Center, we are also imagining what comes next. Over the course of the next year we will define goals, focus areas, and a vision for the next chapter of Education Partnerships. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of Education Partnerships, contact Director of Community Engaged Learning in Education Paitra Houts.
