A Powerful Legacy of Commitment and Service: Honoring John & Tashia Morgridge

Honoring the Remarkable Commitment of John and Tashia Morgridge to City Year
For more than 30 years, John and Tashia Morgridge and the Cisco Foundation, which John chaired for many years, have played a transformational role in City Year’s development, as well as AmeriCorps’ many successes. City Year’s successful effort to demonstrate the powerful role that service-minded young adults can play in our nation’s most under-resourced schools simply would not be possible without John and Tashia’s leadership, support, and belief in our program.

Over the last three decades, John and Tashia Morgridge have contributed more than $10 million in philanthropic leadership support to City Year. Over the same 30-year period, The Cisco Foundation, guided by John’s long-standing belief in City Year’s work, matched this level of support, for a combined $20 million investment in City Year. 

“John and Tashia have brought to City Year their tremendous civic commitment, their belief in the critical role that young people and public schools play in our democracy, their insights on leadership, management, program design and organizational development and — most of all — their enormous warmth, friendship and encouragement,” City Year CEO Jim Balfanz has shared.

The Founding of City Year San Jose
City Year Co-Founder, Michael Brown, related the story of how John Morgridge and Cisco first had a powerful impact on City Year. In January of 1993, City Year presented at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. during President Clinton’s inauguration week. According to Michael, “Susan Hammer, the Mayor of San Jose, came running up to us after the presentation to say she had to have City Year in San Jose. We invited her to visit us in Boston to see City Year in action, so she came a few weeks later, along with a San Jose delegation. I, in turn, visited San Jose, and our very first stop was at Cisco, which was building their headquarters there. We stopped to meet with John Morgridge, who was then the CEO of Cisco. Mayor Hammer told John that she wanted City Year in San Jose as a service resource for the community’s young people. John turned to me to ask about the program, including a series of penetrating questions about our mission and impact and then he said, “How can we help?” I said we needed companies to sponsor a City Year team for $100,000 for each of the first three years, and he immediately committed Cisco as a three-year founding team sponsor. “On that very day, I knew that City Year San Jose was going to be launched and launched powerfully!”

Transforming City Year’s Role in High Poverty Schools
For more than a decade following its founding in 1988, City Year was a general service corps, deploying young adults to organizations with an array of missions. Over time, City Year was drawn increasingly into service in high poverty schools in San Jose and across the country. It became clear that our corps members, who were near peer in age to the students they were serving, could have an outsized impact on student success as full time tutors, mentors and role models. City Year’s leadership and board therefore committed to focusing City Year programs on keeping vulnerable students in school and on track. To achieve these transformational aims, City Year needed a strategic partner — and once again it found that partner in John Morgridge and the Cisco Foundation. 

“Cisco’s investment in developing our Whole School Whole Child program was a complete game-changer,” reports Stephanie Wu, who served as Chief Impact Officer at the time. “They gave us the resources, guidance, and encouragement to build a national platform for training young adults to be effective educational practitioners who helped students achieve from before the first school bell each morning until the last student left our afterschool program.” 

Jim Balfanz, City Year’s CEO, said that “Cisco’s investment in City Year’s educational work allowed us to scale up and become a strategic partner to many of the nation’s highest need urban school districts.” The strength of the Whole School Whole Child program allowed City Year to request resources from school districts, forming a true public private partnership with school districts, AmeriCorps, and private philanthropy coming together to make the work possible.

Following Cisco’s investment, an independent study by Policy Studies Associates found that schools that participated in City Year’s 150 school wide programs in 22 cities were more likely to see overall improvements on their states’ mathematics and English/language arts tests than similar schools that did not participate. Education Week featured the study on its front page, leading to increased demand for City Year programs and a significant rise in school district and philanthropic investment. 

Mentorship, Teamwork and Friendship
Rarely, if ever, are there partners who stay focused and committed to an organization over the course of three decades. That is who John and Tashia have been for City Year. City Year co-founder Michael Brown shared this message about what their support and commitment has meant to him and the organization:

“For 30 years, John has been an incredible mentor to me and other City Year staff members, with his wry sense of humor, his incredible values and his renowned frugality. He and Tashia are a team in every sense of the word. When I’d come out to San Jose each year to see them, they would always be so gracious and meet me for breakfast — wearing their matching City Year San Jose yellow jackets! All told, John and Tashia have personally committed more than $10 million to City Year, which has been transformational – City Year has over 40,000 alumni and is serving in 30 US cities, as well as in the UK and South Africa. None of this would have been possible without their leadership, encouragement and friendship. It is so fitting that City Year San Jose is being led by an executive director, Luke Hostetter, who is a City Year alum. John and Tashia have helped sustain City Year and make it a multi-generational platform for youthful idealism, and we could not be more grateful to them.”