Though it was announced less than a month ago, tonight’s broadcast network roadblock telecast for the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s Think It Up education initiative (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC all will air the hour-long fundraiser at 8 p.m. ET and PT/7 p.m. CT) was seven years in the making.
“In 2008, after we got Stand Up to Cancer off the ground, our board unanimously decided that they wanted to have education be our next initiative,” says EIF president and CEO Lisa Paulsen of the effort, which will be celebrated on the telecast by stars including Stephen Colbert, Scarlett Johansson, Matthew McConaughey, Gwyneth Paltrow, James Corden, Big Sean and Stevie Wonder.
A movement to support and inspire the country’s public school students, Think It Up — in partnership with the nonprofit Donors Choose, which since 2000 has provided teachers with an online platform to raise money for classroom projects — will empower 7th through 12th graders to develop their own learning projects (with guidance from their teachers) and seek online crowdfunding to bring their ideas to life.
As with Stand Up to Cancer, which has raised more than $370 million for cancer research since 2008, EIF started by consulting the experts: “We brought the top thought leaders on education to the table,” says Paulsen of a November 2013 summit convened to focus the mission. It was a crowded and high-powered table: Participants included, among others, Ted Mitchell, then-CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund and now under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education; Dr. John E. Deasy, then-superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District and now superintendent-in-residence at The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems; Vicki Phillips, director of K-12 education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and David Coleman, president and CEO of the College Board. Representing Hollywood and media in the room, along with the EIF board, were Stacey Snider, then-DreamWorks co-chairman & CEO and now co-chair of 20th Century Fox; Starz CEO Chris Albrecht; CAA chief innovation officer Michelle Kydd Lee; Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos; and Twitter head of commerce Nathan Hubbard.
“There wasn’t a consensus,” recalls EIF board chair Sherry Lansing. For the former Paramount CEO and chair, now CEO of her own foundation, education is a personal passion and a onetime profession — Lansing worked as a math and English teacher before launching her career in entertainment. “We were listening and we were getting input,” she recalls of the 2013 summit. “There were many opinions, and we explored many of the actions that were suggested.” But a partnership with Donors Choose, an organization Lansing has supported and advised since 2004 (“It’s wonderful to sit at your desk on a Friday afternoon and look at what the teachers need and choose a project to fund,” she says), wasn’t one of them.
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It was the idea of giving students a voice that ultimately led EIF to pursue the Donors Choose partnership, Paulsen says — and once that was in place, CAA president Richard Lovett, a Donors Choose board member, also joined the effort. Like Lansing, Lovett comes to Think It Up with personal experience as an educator. “I taught at Venice High School for 10 years, a life-skills curriculum that I created for at-risk kids,” he says. “I came to deeply appreciate how challenging it is to be a teacher and what amazing and talented people they are.”
Along with Lovett, CAA’s Alice Ann Wilson, a creative director, Naseeb Gill, an executive in the motion pictures department, and Kydd Lee came on board. “We continued to help with fundraising and with shaping the larger strategy,” says Lovett. And crucially, it was the CAA team that thought up Think It Up. A larger group of stakeholders had spent an entire day brainstorming a name that would capture the guiding principles of the mission, “but we didn’t have it yet,” Lovett recalls. “The next day Michelle Kydd Lee and Alice Ann Wilson went down to one of our conference rooms — what we call ‘the tank’ — and basically worked all day long to come up with the language and visual language to support this big idea.”
A potentially polarizing issue like education may not draw cheerleading from every quarter, but Paulsen and Lansing both say Think It Up is “apolitical.” Adds Lovett, “I understand that people have various points of view about how to best help schools succeed. But this is not a political movement. We’re trying to help kids right now, support teachers right now.” Partners and supporters of Think It Up include the Gates Foundation, XQ Institute, ExxonMobil, Ashoka and Staples.
