The Los Angeles Community College District is the largest community college district in the nation, serving 200,000 students with a budget of $10 million.
Voters will elect three members to the board.
Seat 2
Steven F. Veres
Veres is a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees and works as a state political adviser. He says he has worked to strengthen job training programs and improve graduation rates and wants to make college as affordable as possible.
Robert Payne
Payne taught at L.A. Mission College, worked on movie crews and ran an import business. He would focus on low enrollment growth. He also wants to make community colleges “cheaper, faster, better” in part by offering students more training for specific jobs and less expensive online textbooks.
Kristina Irwin
Irwin serves on the general advisory board at Santa Monica College. She previously served on the board of trustees at Palisades Charter High School. She wants to offer students more tools to succeed in college and to establish “preentry” programs in every local high school to better prepare students for community college.
Adriana Cabrera
Cabrera served as president of the Central Alameda Neighborhood Council and co-founded Empowering Youth in South Central. She wants to make student services easier to navigate and to strengthen financial aid and other support, including for food, housing, child care and mental health.
Roy Payan
Payan has suspended his campaign.
Seat 4
Nancy Pearlman
Pearlman is an environmentalist who served on the LACC Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2017 and taught part time at all nine colleges. She would focus on improving low enrollment while ensuring students are given the necessary support and resources to succeed. She also cites the need to make sure faculty receive equal pay.
Darryn Harris
Harris is a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health and teaches at Santa Monica College. Harris wants to tackle the affordability crisis blocking student achievement by building more low-cost housing on district land and making it “easier for students to get help with food, transportation, child care, and other basic needs.”
Adam Bruno
Bruno has worked as a therapist helping children and been a community college student. His main goals are to increase enrollment and make it easier for students to afford college. He’d explore student stipends as a way to make community college more affordable.
Elaine Alaniz
Alaniz serves as a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience. She wants to better prepare students for a changing workforce and ensure classroom instruction “keeps pace with a rapidly changing workforce” in the age of artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Isidro J. Armenta
Armenta did not reply to The Times’ survey.
Priscilla Umana
Umana works as an American Sign Language interpreter. She says the district’s biggest challenge “is the high percentage of students experiencing housing insecurity, homelessness, and food insecurity.” She would work with the district to expand affordable housing, work-study opportunities and food aid.
Jason R. Aula
Aula has worked as a political campaign consultant and in the world of mobile apps. He considers fraud a major issue including people posing as community college students to steal financial aid. He proposed a moratorium on noncitizens attending district schools and a focus on pandemic learning loss.
Seat 6
Gabriel Buelna
Buelna serves on the board of trustees. He also is an attorney and teaches history and political science at Cal State Northridge. He said a key issue is making college more affordable to students and ensuring that they graduate. He also said the board must conduct strong fiscal oversight of the billions in voter-approved bond funds.
Tonia Arey
Arey has worked in real estate, public advocacy and community engagement. Arey would work to implement campus safety plans, support additional academic advising and career education and more closely “examine spending, contracts, program outcomes and administrative costs to ensure resources reach classrooms and directly support students.”
Randall Winston
Winston works as a licensed architect and attorney and serves as Los Angeles’ deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Mayor Karen Bass. Winston’s priorities for the district include ensuring colleges are a pathway to opportunity and good jobs, that students can afford basic needs and people historically shut out of higher education are let in.
San Francisco artist Barry McGee, 60, walked through Jeffrey Deitch’s Santa Monica Boulevard gallery on a recent Wednesday, while a small army of friends went about their business — some moving objects, others equipped with power tools. A few stood near a closet-size replica of a 99 Cents Only store, an homage to the weeklong art takeover McGee staged at the shuttered Wilshire Boulevard retailer in February.
Gallery visitors were careful not to step on the sprawling assemblage of photographs, drawings and artifacts scattered across the floor. Many were destined for the large installation McGee’s friends helped to assemble for “Another Round,” his recently opened exhibition, which runs through Jan. 30.
Like “99 CENT,” McGee’s aim is for the Deitch show to serve as a gathering place. A makeshift storefront houses an “anarchist bookstore” with activities organized by Matthew James-Wilson, who operates the Heavy Manners lending library and gallery in Echo Park. Events planned during the show’s three-month run include French beading and papier-mâché workshops, clothed figure drawing, and “music shows.”
Adjacent to the bookstore, the untitled work bends and bulges on a plywood structure. It serves as a portal into McGee’s artistic life: Framed messages, photographs of friends, colorful, textile-inspired imagery and his father’s sketches of cars on napkins are grouped together in a bold display.
An untitled installation piece by Barry McGee at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. McGee is showing at the gallery for the first time in 20 years.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
A related installation is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has also been shown at the Oakland Museum of California. “It feels like something entirely new this time and definitely unplanned,” McGee said of the work taking shape at the Deitch show.
The exhibition is billed as McGee’s first gallery exhibit with Deitch in more than 20 years, although the artist and dealer have collaborated on projects since the 1990s. McGee came up in San Francisco’s graffiti scene in the 1980s, developing a visual language under the moniker Twist that included faces, liquor bottles and stylized screws. Deitch traces McGee’s primary influences to the city’s punk, skate, surf and graffiti cultures, as well as its hand-painted signs. McGee has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Fondazione Prada and the 2001 Venice Biennale.
When asked whether he was bringing street art inside for the Deitch show, McGee pushed back. “That’s not my goal at all,” he said.
McGee long ago achieved cult status and comes from a tradition of graffiti that he sees as separate from work made for a gallery. When he began tagging in the 1980s, he said, it wasn’t to create something for the market: “There’s no product at the end.” McGee’s connections across the graffiti scene and the gallery world attract artists and audiences alike for exuberant gatherings, sometimes with complications, as when he transformed the vacant 99 Cents Only Store into a pop-up resembling an indoor flea market during L.A.’s Art Week.
The tagger-turned-blue-chip artist Barry McGee reopened a former 99 Cents Only on Wilshire Boulevard for a one-week art fair event.
(Mariella Rudi)
McGee and Bay Area artist Tom Franco worked with Deitch and the Hole, a gallery that has since closed its Los Angeles location, to stage the exhibition. McGee’s devoted following came out in force: Deitch estimated that about 25,000 people visited. “L.A. really showed up for that,” McGee said.
The event also drew complaints. Several neighboring businesses and apartment buildings were tagged, though McGee said the graffiti was cleaned up. In July, L.A. Taco found that several participating artists had not been paid for work sold during the exhibition. Kathy Grayson, who runs the Hole in New York, wrote in an email that all artists and vendors have since been paid. “It was a gigantic undertaking,” she wrote of staging the exhibit, adding that she had stepped in to help McGee realize his “dream-come-true project.”
Barry McGee is a celebrated street artist who is equally comfortable in a blue-chip world. He brings both sensibilities to bear in his new show, “Another Round,” at Jeffrey Deitch.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
While McGee has no plans to revive the concept, he has created a miniature replica of the 99 Cents Only Store at the gallery, complete with the store’s iconic blue-and-white floor. “The element of surprise is always the best thing,” he said.
Throughout the gallery, McGee’s paintings, drawings and found objects are displayed alongside work by what he estimates will be “around 200” like-minded artists, including C.R. Stecyk III, Chito K.K. and Chris Lux, who mounted two stained-glass works beneath the gallery’s skylights.
“When we do a show with Barry, we get the whole community,” Deitch said. “That’s one of the great things about it.”
Although the exhibition bears his name, McGee is wary of being the center of attention. “In this day and age, a solo anything seems ridiculous,” he said. “The ego of the artist is a tricky thing.” He prefers to bring together different generations and sensibilities: “Some young people, some older people, things that you wouldn’t imagine being next to each other.”
A surfboard installation by Barry McGee is part of his show, “Another Round,” at Jeffrey Deitch gallery on Santa Monica Blvd.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
McGee’s own work is also in dialogue with itself: Geometric patterns, inspired in part by Islamic tile designs, share the canvas with his trademark male faces with drooping, melancholic eyes.
Deitch describes McGee as possessing “a unique kind of charisma.” Though shy, “he’s very accessible and reaches people.”
Franco agrees. He had wanted to meet McGee long before they encountered each other in a San Francisco thrift store last year, and he admires his support for less established artists.
“He nurtures young people,” Franco said. “It’s amazing to see. Somebody at his level, you can easily forget how famous he is, or how accomplished he is, because he’ll hug every single person who comes through the door.”
McGee sees the relationship as reciprocal. “They’re mentoring me also. It’s really mutual,” he said. “Their visual language is so rich.”
Working into the evenings after mornings spent surfing with his crew, McGee is allowing the exhibition to take shape as it goes. His connection to surfing is visible in the gallery, where surfboards are stacked like a wooden fan.
He contrasts his freedom to improvise at Deitch with museums’ lengthy planning schedules: “Their shows are seven years out, sometimes. So there’s no room for spontaneity.”
A week before the Deitch show opened, he was still anticipating what it might become. “I still don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.
The 16 candidates vying for three seats on the board that overseas the Los Angeles Community College District have diverse backgrounds and varying ideas — and near unanimous agreement that district leaders need to do more to meet the basic needs of students struggling to pursue their higher education goals.
The candidates include those with experience both within and outside the district, with many citing the need to better connect students in the largest community college district in the nation with good paying jobs after they graduate. The seven-member Board of Trustees are managing a 2022 voter-approved $5.3 billion bond-funded construction boom to revitalize aging campuses and build student housing and at the same time are grasping to find ways to meet the basic needs of students, the majority of whom are low-income, juggling school with jobs.
Members of the board are elected to at-large seats and do not represent a specific area. The 900-square-mile district includes the city of Los Angeles and nearby cities, including Culver City, Montebello and Burbank.
Seat 2
In Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres is being challenged by three candidates: writer Robert Payne, business owner Kristina Irwin and educator Adriana Cabrera. Roy Payan is also on the ballot for Seat 2, but told The Times he has suspended his campaign.
Veres has served on the Board of Trustees for multiple terms and also works as a staff director and policy advisor for state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who previously ran the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and will soon take a seat on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
In responses to a Times questionnaire, Veres said during his 13 years on the LACCD Board he’s been able to strengthen job training programs, improve graduation rates and helped push to give students access to free and discounted food and emergency housing shelter.
Veres has the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment, including Durazo, Mayor Karen Bass and the county Democratic party. Four members of the board of trustees support him, as does the district’s faculty and staff unions.
Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, a campaign committee sponsored by the faculty union has paid for nearly $150,000 worth of slate mailers in support of Veres, according to campaign finance records.
An online database of campaign finance records show the other candidates, Payne, Irwin and Cabrera, have not received campaign contributions. Those candidates did not respond to a request for comment about their fundraising.
Seat 4
Seat 4 is an open race, with seven candidates running. Incumbent Sara Hernandez is stepping down and running for state senate.
The most well-funded Seat 4 candidate is Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, who recently started teaching a class on student skills at Santa Monica College, which is not an LACCD campus.
Harris has the support of a wide swath of Democratic politicians and organizations, as well as labor unions and six of seven current LACCD trustees.
Others running for Seat 4 include environmentalist and former board member Nancy Pearlman; therapist Adam Bruno; healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz; sign language educational interpreter Priscilla Umana; fire department employee Isidro Armenta; and business owner Jason Aula, who in response to the Times questionnaire, as well as in a recent press release, included comments about the Chinese Communist party and cannibalism.
Seat 6
Perhaps the most contested race is Seat 6, where incumbent Gabriel Buelna is facing off against Randall Winston, who serves as deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Bass.
Buelna failed to gain a key endorsement of the district’s faculty guild, whose executive board endorsed Winston.
James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision to endorse Winston, but said the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.
AFT 1521A, the guild representing district clerical and technical staff, issued a dual endorsement of both Winston and Buelna and has given money to both campaigns.
“I absolutely really love both,” said Andrea Edwards, president of the staff guild. “I could not choose.”
Others running for Seat 6 are community college professor Roberto David LaCarra and realtor Tonia Arey.
Buelna and Arey have accused Winston of misleading the public by listing architect as his occupation on the ballot, as well as describing himself as an educator and a teacher at West L.A. college during the campaign.
“The public doesn’t understand who he really is,” Buelna said.
Arey, who was endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., has vowed to ensure there’s more transparency and accountability surrounding the district’s nearly $10-billion annual budget.
Asked in an interview why he didn’t list deputy mayor of infrastructure as his occupation when it’s his day-to-day job, Winston said “architect seemed to resonate the most and architect is my first professional degree and fundamentally part of still how I think and act.” Winston said he is currently licensed to practice architecture but doesn’t practice day to day.
Winston said he will also start teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College later this fall and is currently helping to teach a workshop at the college on climate solutions. He also said he has mentored UCLA students.
“I believe I have met the qualifications of an educator,” he said.
The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk‘s Office disagreed and declined to allow Winston to list educator as his occupation on the ballot, according to an Aug. 27 email from the registrar’s office to Winston.
Winston said that at the time “West LA College was still completing the administrative processing for my adjunct instructor appointment.”
Before becoming deputy mayor, Winston also ran the California Strategic Growth Council, which helps fund sustainable development.
McKeever of the faculty union said he saw Winston’s long experience in development as an architect, deputy mayor and head of the growth council as an asset to the district as trustees deal with the bond-funded building program.
“This will help maintain the integrity of the bond process as the district moves forward with new construction projects,” McKeever said.
Despite not receiving the endorsement of the faculty guild, Buelna retains the support of a number of faculty members, including the president of the academic senate, Angela Echeverri.
Echeverri said Buelna “really cares about students and education” and helped successfully push for state legislation to make it easier for students to take courses in languages other than English.
The law “really opened up community colleges to people who previously couldn’t access education,” she said.
As the nation hurtles toward a pivotal and divisive midterm election, it’s fair to wonder if people on opposite sides of the political spectrum will ever be able to again live peacefully as neighbors, to talk, and especially listen, to each other.
It’s a question co-directors Robert May and Barry Levinson and producer Jason Sosnoff set out to answer in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It led to their five-part docuseries, “Bucks County, USA,” now on streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app, that unfolds across four years in a suburban Pennsylvania county being ripped apart by vicious school board battles poisoned by partisan personal conflicts. (The finale streams Sunday, and the full docuseries will air Oct. 29 on SoCal PBS.)
“We don’t pay enough attention to one another,” Levinson says. “We just say, ‘I’ve formed my position and I’m locked into it’ and we don’t share enough interaction where we can discuss things. Democracy requires interactions, and if we cannot find a way to find common ground, that’s my big worry.”
The series shows how Paul Martino spent a fortune supporting Republican candidates who supported reopening schools quickly after the height of the pandemic but then, more contentiously, turned their attention to the culture wars. They focused on what was being taught in the classrooms and stocked on the shelves in the school libraries, leaving teachers feeling attacked and Black families and LGBTQ+ students alienated and ostracized.
“It’s unexpected how something like that can accelerate into such a contentious situation,” Levinson says, “where well-educated people in a wonderful community can’t figure things out.”
May says national polarization is poisoning the atmosphere locally. “It became a life-or-death battle in the name of their kids, but they both felt their children would be mercilessly mistreated if they didn’t do something to save them from the other side.”
An aerial view of Bucks County, Pa., the community at the center of Robert May and Barry Levinson’s docuseries.
(SenArt Films & Baltimore Pictures)
The filmmakers followed the heated battles as people in the divided community resorted to screaming and name-calling. It frequently plays like a fun house nightmare version of “Our Town.” That’s true even of their version of the play’s Stage Manager. Two teenagers, Evi Casey and Vanessa Martino, Paul’s daughter, guide us through each episode. While the girls are best friends, Evi’s liberal mother and Vanessa’s conservative father view each other as hostile opposition.
“I think the series does a good job of showing the political division and how it affects the kids,” says Casey.
The series opens with a school choir singing “What a Wonderful World” underneath a collection of residents telling us how they’ve been berated: “I’ve been called a pedophile.” “I’ve been called a Nazi.” “I’ve been called anti-American.” “I’ve been called a dyke and a groomer.”
But the series then gets to know people in depth, allowing for far more nuance than the contentious school board meetings.
“My hope was that people can take the time to at least have a deeper conversation with somebody who they think is doing harm to their community and try and understand it better, “ Sosnoff adds. “It starts with microchanges where somebody reconsiders the way they might harm somebody else.”
Katherine “Kitty” Good Semisch, a retired Bucks County teacher and a key figure in the documentary, says the series is perfectly timed for the midterms because of its efforts to humanize everyone. “Dehumanization and demonization lead to the worst outcomes, and this kicks out from under anybody the lazy position that the people on the other side aren’t human,” she says. “Everyone is just trying to find something that works for their community.”
Sosnoff originally approached Levinson with the idea of a project that would humanize both sides, but his original idea was to bring people together at a summer camp with a facilitator so they could get to know each other better. “Barry wisely said, ‘That’s more of a sociological experiment where you’re playing God,’” Sosnoff recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s focus on a seemingly idyllic small town, like in “Our Town,” and examine what happened and why.’”
They chose Bucks County, a purple county in a purple state. “It’s not a place of extremists but people were really inflamed,” Sosnoff says, noting that some people were reluctant to speak on camera. “The climate of fear was very much alive. It was a community in trauma.”
There are brawls over policy that lead to lawsuits, but the main drama is the 2023 school board election, where the Democrats hoped to reverse the Republicans’ 6-3 majority.
While May says he is offended by “people that don’t care about other people or their right to exist,” especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, he emphasized that he resisted taking sides in the documentary. “When we don’t see people as human, that’s when you lose a society.”
Indeed, Sosnoff says that while it’s bad when people are marginalized and victimized by discrimination from those in power, they’d still edit episodes to keep everything balanced, occasionally saying, “We need to give conservative characters more screen time and understand their positions.” (He also says they grew to like everyone involved.)
At the center of the drama depicted in “Bucks County, USA” is a school board election and a community grappling with political division.
(SenArt Films & Baltimore Pictures)
May says he knows some viewers will be furious with this approach, but he hopes that if they watch all five episodes, they’ll get a full picture. “You can’t just see parts of it. You need to see in order,” May says. “People reveal who they are over the five episodes. There’s an extraordinary amount of nuance, but if somebody’s saying something stupid, we have that too.”
(And don’t mistake May’s efforts at evenhandedness for a lack of passion — the day after a 30-minute joint interview with Levinson, he called me back and talked, largely uninterrupted, mostly about bias and perceptions.)
Amazingly, most people interviewed from both sides in the community support the final version.
At the center of the action are Vanessa’s mother, Aarati Martino, who ran for school board as a Republican, and Paul, who poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board elections.
“Overall, I am pleased,” Paul Martino says now. “There’s some things I think don’t portray the facts exactly quite right, but they recorded 500 hours and you’re not going to love everything that’s on the screen. Everybody is represented in this film.”
Martino, who never really owns the impact of him using his fortune to try to elect cultural conservatives, says he’s been “unfairly attacked” and has become “a convenient boogeyman in some of the scenes. But I’m actually not even upset about that piece of the puzzle.” (What he feels is lacking is that in 2021 he says 30% of the 300 candidates he funded around the state were Democrats.)
And Donte King, whose family endures racism both subtle and blatant, praises the filmmakers’ attempts to humanize people with contrasting viewpoints, saying he was pleased with getting to tell his story. “It allows people to connect with you,” he says. “We might have different ideologies, but we’re more alike than we are unalike, so maybe somebody who votes blue will identify with someone who votes red and vice versa.”
The closest thing to a hero in the series may be Semisch, a liberal, who shows civic courage in her efforts to build bridges, meeting one-on-one with Vonna DeArmond, a conservative elementary school teacher, and organizing events like an ice cream social and a candle-making evening. (Martino also posted an online peace offering, saying he’d buy anyone from the other side drinks; Semisch was the only one to take him up on it, but several people interviewed, including May, say Martino’s unbending personality may explain the lack of response.)
Semisch wishes that May had fact-checked some of the misleading claims by the right, but she praises the series’ subtlety. “I understand people’s frustration, but they’re leaving it to the audience to sort out who’s making sense,” she says. “My side was advocating for more books in the library and for better training for teachers to navigate difficult topics. As you watch, it seems to me that the people on the other side aren’t making as much sense.”
Near the end of the series, there’s one sweet moment of coming together between Evi’s and Vanessa’s mothers and another moment of seemingly genuine outreach by one of the town’s conservatives to King. But there’s also plenty of acrimony and recrimination in the aftermath of the school board election and one final confrontation between King and Paul Martino at a roundtable that leaves little doubt that tensions are still simmering.
Still, May says, “I remain hopeful and optimistic because I’ve seen the humanity in all of them. I think things are better there now than when we started.”
Semisch, with DeArmond, will lead discussions about the series in Bucks County and May hopes others will follow suit around the country. He and Levinson hope that by strengthening local communities, it can eventually lead to stronger national bonds. “Maybe people can learn from them. Maybe this series is literally the beginning of a change.”
Sosnoff is a bit more measured in his final assessment, quoting a participant as saying, “We haven’t buried the hatchet yet, but it’s been put away in the closet,” he says. “I’ll take that as progress.”
The feature is co-produced by the Daily Wire — the right-wing media company launched in 2015 by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro — and Bonfire Legend, a production company formed by prolific producer Dallas Sonnier in 2021.
Frequently featured in movies targeting Latino audiences, Trejo built a devoted following within the demographic over the years as one of the more prominent Mexican American actors in Hollywood.
He was criticized online for his involvement in “Pawn Shop” due to its positive portrayal of ICE agents, who have been antagonizing the Latino community at an accelerated clip over the last two years. Trejo was called a “sellout” and a “traitor” across social media in recent days.
“I want to address some social media comments about me. Make no mistake. I am a proud Mexican who has always been and will always be a supporter of my community,” Trejo wrote in an Instagram post. “I am also obviously pro-immigrant. I am not pro ICE. I know where I come from and I know our struggles. I am an actor. My job is to tell a story.”
Trejo’s casting was first announced by the Montana newspaper Bozeman Daily Chronicle after speaking with one of Trejo’s cast members on the film’s set in Livingston, Mont., as well as Livingston locals who had seen and photographed the actor in the city’s downtown area.
Deadline confirmed that Trejo, along with “Reservoir Dogs” actor Harvey Keitel and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” star Henry Thomas, was scheduled to appear in the film after reviewing the call sheet.
The 82-year-old Trejo has previously voiced support for immigrant communities. During the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, he was part of a coalition of Latino actors who pushed forward the #AyudaEnEspanol campaign, which advocated for providing COVID-19 resources kits in Spanish for Latino migrant farmworkers across the U.S.
In an interview with TMZ in fall 2025, the actor, who has appeared in over 400 films and television programs, was asked to give a message to the families that had been affected by ICE raids.
“To the families, keep up hope,” Trejo said. “Help your neighbor and do whatever you can for people in need.”
His recent statement came after “Pawn Shop” made headlines for hitting snags in its production in Livingston following local protests. Residents claimed the movie’s production interrupted local businesses’ operations — and that the crew did not properly communicate with businesses about its schedule.
Production on the film was temporarily paused on Oct. 3 from an order by the Livingston city commission. Filming resumed on Oct. 6 after Livingston officials reinstated permits for the movie.
It never has been about the glory for Semaj Morgan.
Not the touchdowns. Not the name, image and license deals. And not even the 2024 national championship he won with Michigan.
For the UCLA wide receiver, all of that plays second fiddle to giving back to his community in Detroit and touching the lives of the people around him through the Semaj J. Morgan Foundation — an initiative he started when he was 17 years old.
“My foundation is definitely the best thing that I do. It’s great being a football player, but being able to give back and show people that I really care for others and not just about football and money, I want to be able to pour back into the people that support me and show me love,” Morgan said. “A lot of people don’t get to wake up every day and know that there’s going to be food around. A lot of people in the city of Detroit don’t even know if they’re going to eat at all.”
UCLA receiver Semaj Morgan is surrounded by children he has helped through his foundation.
(Courtesy of the Morgan family)
Morgan decided he wanted to start the foundation when he handed out toys with the Dream Team Male Mentoring group, telling his dad, Semaj T. Morgan, that community service was his calling. But at 17, he was too young to have his name on the paperwork, so his parents opened the foundation for him.
Since the foundation’s launch in February 2023, Morgan has hosted turkey drives, during which he gives away 2,000 turkeys, 2,000 food bags and 1,000 hot meals along with hats, coats, scarves and gloves, in an effort to tackle the health and food gaps in his community.
Morgan also has spearheaded back-to-school giveaways, handing out backpacks and supplies to children.
“We don’t do it just to do it. We do it because we’re trying to close the educational gap that our kids in Detroit suffer from,” Morgan’s father said.
“When you have a kid that’s going to school with the same notebooks and pens and highlighters and erasers that their counterparts have, now they have more confidence when they go to school.”
Morgan received a grant from the Ballmer Group, founded by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and his wife, for the foundation’s DiscoverWorks Summer program. The initiative serves 250 families, giving students the opportunity to get their test scores up in the morning and go on field trips in the afternoon, alongside other enrichment activities such as robotics and mentoring.
UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava celebrates with Semaj Morgan after scoring a touchdown against Purdue at the Rose Bowl on Sept. 19.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
But the endeavor closest to Morgan’s heart is the foundation’s Mother’s Day and Father’s Day events.
“These are mothers and fathers who lost their sons to gun violence. Semaj is their son, and he takes his NIL money, and he takes them to dinner, buys them gifts as if their son was here,” Morgan’s father said. “These are parents that a lot of these children’s murders have not been solved, so this is a way for us to bless these parents, let them know that they’re not forgotten. There’s never a dry eye in the room.”
The events — which started out with 10 moms and five dads and are up to 35 moms and 20 dads — are particularly special to Morgan, who was friends with some of the sons of the parents involved. Morgan said that seeing the parents and hearing their testimonies puts everything in his life into perspective.
While Morgan is humble about the effect his foundation has had on the people around him, others are taking notice.
UCLA receiver Semaj Morgan holds up a Michigan state Senate certificate recognizing his foundation’s work to support people in Detroit.
(Courtesy of Morgan familiy)
Morgan was recognized on the Michigan House floor by state Sens. John DaMoose and Rosemary Bayer for the community service that he’s led in Detroit.
And during the 2024-25 academic year, Morgan was nominated for the inaugural Big Ten Jackie Robinson Community & Impact Award by his previous school, Michigan, for his philanthropic work.
“He understands his mission and call in life, and that’s to bless other people. He’s not about him; he’s about other people, and it’s very rare that you see individuals at such a young age understand their mission and cause in life,” Morgan’s father said.
“Football is one thing, but when he’s giving out turkeys, food bags, hats and coats, he has a bigger smile than getting in the end zone because he understands these people need help.”
Morgan’s desire to help others was inspired by Curtis Blackwell — Morgan’s travel football coach and president of Sound Mind Sound Body Sports Academy. Morgan’s father said Blackwell always urged players to give back to others.
Blackwell, who coached Arizona Cardinals cornerback Will Johnson, Buffalo Bills cornerback Maxwell Hairston and former Michigan safety Makari Paige alongside Morgan, stresses education before football and places an equal emphasis on academics, athletics and life skills.
And because Michigan does not get the same high school football exposure as Texas, Florida or California, Blackwell was keen on getting his players on college visits, leading to Morgan receiving more than 25 offers — a direct result of the travel the team made to raise players’ exposure.
“Growing up in a single-parent home, I was fortunate to get a scholarship to college, and it was because of my coaches. And had it not been for my coaches, I don’t know where I would be,” Blackwell said. “If we as coaches are the best people to really influence young people, they will listen to their coach more than their mom, their teacher. And so if we can get the coaches to be the teachers off the field, we could really change their attitude.”
Blackwell was astounded that Morgan was the pupil who took the program’s mission the furthest, surpassing the efforts of NFL players and affecting people well before he’s turned 21.
“You don’t have to wait till you get to the NFL to make an impact. You don’t have to wait till you retire to give back. You can do something every step along the way, and that’s what we teach to our kids — lift as you climb,” Blackwell said. “Semaj took that and ran with it. He has a really big heart and he’s a person that is a giver, not a taker. He’s going to give you the shirt off his back.”
UCLA receiver Semaj Morgan catches a touchdown pass against Purdue at the Rose Bowl Stadium on Sept. 19.
(Kevin Terrell / Getty Images)
Morgan earned his bachelor’s degree at Michigan and is working on his master’s degree at UCLA while playing football and running his foundation from the West Coast. But he may miss his first foundation event when UCLA travels to Ann Arbor to play his former school in November, although coach Bob Chesney already gave him permission to stay in Michigan after the team leaves.
Morgan’s greatest achievement that weekend may not involve the scoreboard at the Big House.
“I might not have done the best on the field last year, but being able to come home knowing that I’m touching people’s lives, that’s the biggest thing for me,” Morgan said. “To do this at such a young age, and grow so rapidly and touch so many lives, it’s great for me. After football, I want to continue to give back to people. I eventually want to be able to start football programs.”
Students, teachers and volunteers in a working-class Dakar neighbourhood have joined forces to clean up the dilapidated Medina Gounass Elementary School in advance of the new academic year, highlighting wider concerns over public education and sanitation in Senegal’s capital.
On Saturday, pupils, members of environmental organisations and residents swept classrooms, cleared drains and collected piles of plastic and household waste from the school in Medina Gounass, a densely populated suburb of Dakar.
The initiative comes as the 2026-27 school year is set to begin on Monday for staff and Tuesday for students.
Footage from the scene shows young students wielding brooms and shovels alongside older volunteers.
Medina Gounass, like many outlying districts of Dakar, struggles with inadequate waste management, blocked drainage and overcrowded classrooms, problems that often worsen during the rainy season.
Organisers say the cleanup is meant not only to ready the school for reopening but also to raise awareness among students and residents about the importance of environmental protection and shared responsibility for public spaces.
