Stacey Snider, co-chairman and CEO of DreamWorks Studios, cites her years at a service-oriented Quaker high school in Pennsylvania with informing her work with City Year, the youth service corps that administers school-based service and youth leadership programs. A Los Angeles City Year board member, Snider, 50, this year helped organize its first fundraiser, raising nearly $1 million. “I believe that the problems in our communities can theoretically be ameliorated if kids stay in school,” she says. “From a larger perspective, that has always rung true to me. And I wanted to put my efforts in that.”
When Jane Rosenthal, 54, took her husband, Craig Hatkoff, to a New York hospital for a routine operation, she was reminded how the education programs of the nonprofit Tribeca Film Institute, of which she is co-founder and co-chairman of the board, make a difference. The admitting nurse recognized Rosenthal’s name and said her son had attended Tribeca Teaches. “He didn’t want to do his homework before and now he wants to be a filmmaker,” she said. The in-school and after-school media program that includes instruction in documentary filmmaking is administered by TFI, which grew out of the Tribeca Film Festival, co-founded by Rosenthal, her producing partner Robert De Niro and Hatkoff to revitalize downtown Manhattan post-9/11. Says Rosenthal: “You find that kids who could not express themselves through writing are now expressing themselves through media literacy.”
