From uplifting inner-city scholars in South Central L.A. to prison moms in Colorado to a Monterey Park community in need, ձ alumni embrace the College's mission
Over its 138-year history, Occidental has educated generations of students who have pursued lives dedicated to “the public good.” That phrase goes to the heart of ձ’s mission, which states: “The distinctive interdisciplinary and multicultural focus of the College’s academic program seeks to foster both the fulfillment of individual aspirations and a deeply rooted commitment to the public good.”
The stories of Eric P.S. Chen ’05, Tammy Bird ’84, Mike Hoover ’65, and Jenny Dean Schmidt ’86 have a common bond in community. In the face of tragedy, inequity, injustice, and even incarceration, their dedication to the betterment of others rises above the ordinary. Their names are not as recognizable as a Jack Kemp ’57 or Barack Obama ’83, but their contributions are immense.
A mass shooting is an unlikely impetus for public service, but Eric P.S. Chen ’05 was spurred into action after a 72-year-old Asian American gunman targeted a ballroom in Monterey Park on January 21, 2023, killing 11 people and wounding nine others. (Chen himself was invited to the Lunar New Year’s party at Star Ballroom Dance Studio that night—but at the suggestion of his girlfriend, they went out for hot pot instead.)
Chen, who is a Presbyterian pastor, credits his Occidental education with building his critical thinking skills and teaching him how to ask the right questions to help the Monterey Park survivors, such as “What do the victims need?” Tracking down all of the survivors of the shooting wasn’t easy, he recalls, because many ran away. However, they still needed help managing the bureaucracy of various law enforcement agencies—and that’s where Chen stepped in.
Some survivors needed help getting their IDs back and didn’t know which department to contact, while others needed assistance applying for disability, he says. Those who had run away from the scene weren’t documented as victims of a crime, and Chen helped them remedy that so they could access funds from the California Victims Compensation Board. At first, he says, he did a lot of this work by himself, but eventually was able to partner with nonprofits or state agencies that specialize in this type of case work.
Chen’s volunteer work with the community also involved his linguistic skills: Some of the survivors were not fluent in English, so he helped translate paperwork for them. In fact, when President Joe Biden visited the survivors on March 14, 2023, “I became the de facto White House liaison,” Chen says, because of his linguistic skills and relationship with the victims.
The third component of his work with the Asian American community in the last few years has been raising awareness about mental health, which is still a taboo topic among many immigrants. “In about a one-year period, there were three older Asian immigrant men that committed these mass shootings,” he says. “All of them had mental health issues.” Chen felt it was important to speak more openly about the topic in his community—not only because of how it contributed to these tragic events, but to help survivors deal with their trauma.
“I started to realize that not everybody’s willing to talk to a counselor,” he says, “but we can always find a lot of different ways to support each other.” Chen helped establish a peer support group that allowed people in the community to gather, particularly on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. “They were able to share,” he says. “It was a breakthrough, just getting it off their chest. They hadn’t talked to anybody.”
In this vein, Chen has partnered with a few Christian Chinese-speaking nonprofit organizations in order to launch an initiative focusing on mental health. He says he felt these specific types of organizations were the best way to get through to his community because he had seen their effectiveness firsthand when his own parents were having marital problems and sought out their help.
As a student at ձ, Chen majored in political science and minored in Asian studies, which has also served him in his career as an import-export logistics consultant. “Exporting to each Asian country has its own unique challenges,” he says, noting that the same goes for importing Asian goods. Chen has put his cultural knowledge and research skills to good use for his clients, particularly in navigating recent tariffs.
Chen’s volunteer work goes beyond helping the survivors of the Monterey Park shooting. He gives back to his high school alma mater in the San Gabriel Valley, helping coach kids on the debate team, which he says placed fifth in a nationwide tournament last year. Gabrielino High School is located in a predominantly immigrant community with a high percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students and English language learners, he explains, adding, “I felt like someone that knows what they went through and I wanted to be someone that can empower them.” (The school’s mock trial team, for which he is the primary coach, recently placed second in a Los Angeles County competition.)
Chen cites Occidental’s commitment to public service and focus on giving back as strongly impacting who he is today. “The values instilled in me at ձ also aligned with and deepened my Christian values of love, empathy, and compassion,” he adds. (He co-founded a nonprofit, Hope SGV, that formalizes his volunteer work in various parts of his San Gabriel Valley community.) Reflecting on the work he has done to support the Monterey Park survivors, he says, “I was thankful for the opportunity to be kind of the glue that brought all the things together.”
Tammy Bird ’84 never imagined becoming a teacher. She majored in biology at Occidental, worked on the Vantuna (even with a cast on her leg, which she covered with a pair of Levi’s) and played pick-up volleyball at lunchtime with her ichthyology and marine invertebrate professors, John Stephens and Gary Martin. “The way I love to learn is hands-on,” she says. “ձ gave that to me.”
The only education course she took was an independent study, and Bird looked at her first job out of college—teaching science in the L.A. Unified School District—as a detour en route to veterinary school. Instead, she fell in love with the profession and spent the next 37 years in the classroom. “I did not find teaching,” she says. “Teaching found me.”
When Bird was placed at Crenshaw High School—an inner-city school with a higher dropout rate than the LAUSD average—she was handed a roll book, a textbook, and not much else. “Here I was, coaching volleyball and teaching on the third floor and feeling claustrophobic,” she recalls. “I’m kind of an outdoor person.”
After her second year of teaching, “I was wandering around campus and found the old agriculture center,” Bird says. “I went to the principal and asked, ‘Can I have that space back there?’ And the principal said, ‘Well, the teacher who left that space was getting shot at—do you really want that?’” Bird persisted, saying, “I have to have my doors open.”
Overcoming the school’s paucity of resources, Bird came up with new programs, such as Zoo on Wheels (“I had lots of animals and we took them to local elementary schools”). And over time, she revitalized a long-dormant campus garden as a space to grow and sell vegetables while teaching students about agriculture, science, marketing, and business.
After the L.A. Uprising in the spring of 1992, Bird says, “There were people coming into the neighborhood who wanted to do something to feel better about themselves.” Among them was advertising executive Melinda McMullen, who embraced Bird’s ideas to turn the garden into a viable student-owned business, which would come to be known as Food From the ’Hood.
Bird managed weekly trips to the Santa Monica Farmers Market, where students sold their produce. McMullen created awareness of the program, from the Los Angeles Times to CBS Morning News, culminating in a 1995 Newsweek cover story and reception at the Kennedy Center honoring “people who made a difference.” Sandwiched in between those milestones was a November 1994 visit from Prince Charles to Crenshaw High, including a lunch for 150 in the school’s expansive garden area.
And did we mention the salad dressing? Working with entrepreneur Norris Bernstein and a Hawthorne-based food manufacturer, Bird’s students developed a line of salad dressings called Straight Out the Garden, which eventually were sold in more than 2,000 stores in 28 states. All profits were designated for scholarship aid for students, based on the number of hours they worked.
All that activity attracted the notice of Mike Hoover ’65, whose singular career as a war photographer (embedded with the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan), adventurer, rock climber, and Oscar-winning filmmaker (for his 1984 short Up) preceded another calling as a champion for inner-city youth and the wrongfully incarcerated.
In the aftermath of the 1992 riots, Hoover and his wife, Beverly Johnson, took a tour of South Los Angeles with a veteran Blood gang boss, who explained to them which buildings burned and why. “We saw seven young kids hanging on a fence looking at the National Guard trucks passing by,” Hoover recalls, and Beverly said, ‘These are our kids.’”
Beverly died less than two years later, in a helicopter crash in Nevada that also took the life of Walt Disney Company President Frank Wells. Hoover miraculously survived the crash, and in the wake of that tragedy, he created a memorial fund in Beverly’s name to create educational opportunities for 13- to 15-year-olds in South L.A. “That’s when a kid starts to become an adult,” he says, “and is usually confused and overloaded.”
In 1996, Hoover sent two L.A. teenagers to attend Teton Science Schools in Kelly, Wyoming. Two years later he was introduced to Bird on a visit to Crenshaw High—the two were unaware of their ձ connection—and insisted that she meet Teton Science Schools Executive Director Jack Shea. After flying from Salt Lake City over the jagged Tetons in a plane piloted by Hoover, Bird bonded with Shea and they created a program, with Hoover raising the money, that would provide low-income, high-performing students the chance to attend a two-week summer outdoor education program at Teton’s Jackson campus.
At first, Bird recalls, “Mike wanted the group to include gang members and at-risk kids, and I said to him, ‘No, it’s going to be the good kid that gets their first good chance.’”
The program initially included a cohort of 32 students from Crenshaw and Dorsey high schools. Many participants were “kids who had never been in grass over their shoe tops,” recalls Ron Whitney ’64, retired headmaster of the Heritage School in Calistoga and a track and field teammate of Hoover’s at ձ. “Many of them had never even been to the ocean, and the ocean was right there.”
“They all hated being in the mountains at a log cabin science school,” Hoover adds. “After one week, they’re dirty, mosquito-bitten, wild and happy, and never want to leave.”
When Bird moved to Carson High School in 2004, the Teton program soon followed—and moved from summer to late fall, “when the environment in Wyoming is different than what they’re used to,” she says. “Working with the Tetons, we developed this amazing curriculum that built leadership, taught a sense of place, and tied into projects that we could do back at school. We had themes for each day, and the last theme was resiliency—such as hiking to the top of a mountain or a higher elevation and really pushing yourself past what you think you can do. We had these kinds of things going on, and it worked wonderfully.”
Back at Carson, she was busy reshaping the school’s science curriculum to embrace environmental science, engineering, and technology. “We started looking at green energy and how to live more sustainably,” she says. “We put a windmill in the garden, began playing with solar panels, and maintained over 350 fruit trees in the food forestry.”
In 2007, an old friend from high school reached out to her via social media. Romance blossomed, and Bird gained a partner in the program as well. Retired college counselor Nuu “Tui” Tuimoloau became a full-time volunteer at Carson, helping out with the garden as well as a nascent robotics program that went toe-to-toe with deeper-pocketed rivals at Long Beach City College’s Marine Advanced Technology Education competition.
In his T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, “Tui had this rapport with kids—and he was very technologically advanced,” says Whitney, who witnessed firsthand Carson’s third-place finish at a state robotics meet. “Tammy and Tui had this magic together.”
In 2015, Bird and Tuimoloau bought a property in Hawai‘i with plans to eventually retire there. “We were going to build it in a faleoʻo style and grow produce there because that was our passion,” Bird recalls. “I wanted to retire as a teacher while I still loved students and still loved the process.”
Bird was more than halfway through her final year in the classroom when the pandemic hit, the lockdown shuttered schools, and the prospects of moving to Hawai‘i anytime soon were dim.
Then, on April 24, 2020, Tuimoloau was run over and killed by a 20-year-old man after a confrontation in San Pedro. Bird suffered another major loss five months later with the death of her father.
“When Mike found out Tui had been murdered, he got in his car in Wyoming and drove all the way to my place,” Bird recalls. “We went and sat in his car and talked and cried for two and a half hours. And then he dropped me off and drove back to Wyoming.”
Of Tuimoloau, she says, “I am blessed that he was back in my life for 13 years and we got to do the projects that we did. That was awesome. Tui wouldn’t want me to dwell.”
Bird retired in June 2020 and moved to Hawai‘i two years later. “From the time I started teaching at 22 until I was 58, I can’t remember having any me time,” she says. “Now, I can go for a hike and watch a volcano erupt. I can go down to the ocean and see the turtles. I can cook for my friends. I’m building my garden. I’m making essential oils and growing herbs, and I’m getting to experiment with things I used to teach in the classroom. I feel safe and at peace here. I have animals again, and I’ll have chickens again soon.”
Back on the mainland, Hoover remains as busy as ever. He continues to advocate for the release of two men he met through the Crenshaw after-school program: Roger Douglas, who is serving a life sentence under California’s “three strikes” law for a minor drug offense; and Richard Dor, who was convicted at age 18 (despite eyewitness testimony in his favor) of a murder he didn’t commit.
More happily, in mid-November, more than a dozen Carson High students trekked to the Tetons for a weeklong immersion in science and nature. “Our kids were in eight groups, each representing one of the eight Western states, arguing for water rights—a fun way to learn about something we take for granted,” says Hoover, who hopes to continue the program indefinitely. “What could I do that would be better than this?”
As a political science major at Occidental, Jenny Dean Schmidt ’86 landed an internship with the BBC in London—and that was the start of her career as a journalist. “I don’t want to have this wrong historically, but I think they said I was their first American intern ever,” she says.
After graduating, she leveraged her ձ connections to get an entry-level job at ABC News. Once she moved on to a position at KMIR, the NBC affiliate in Palm Springs, Dean Schmidt says she was finally able to put her political science major to good use: For a recurring segment called “Jenny Dean’s Political File,” she scored interviews with former President Gerald Ford and sitting Congressman Sonny Bono.
In 1995, she moved to WEWS-TV in Cleveland as a political reporter, winning a Local Emmy for her reporting (from both the Democratic and Republican national conventions) on the 1996 presidential race. But after becoming a mom, Dean Schmidt realized she wanted to counteract the negativity that informed TV news.
“I was telling people about car wrecks and murders and bank robberies and horrible things, and people wanted my autograph for telling them bad news all day long,” she says. Instead, she wanted to put out constructive media content to “honor the role of motherhood. I wanted to change the conversation to say, ‘Do not overlook the importance of this role to our culture at large.’”
After relocating to the Denver area with her family, she founded a nonprofit organization and media hub called ChannelMom in 2006. The hub started with YouTube videos about motherhood, and then moved on to a radio show and podcast, where Dean Schmidt interviewed authors and experts on parenting, family issues, and faith.
In 2009, she left her role as a TV reporter with a station in Denver to devote herself to being a stay-at-home mom and building up ChannelMom. As the organization grew, Dean Schmidt began doing more public service-oriented work, partnering with Denver Rescue Mission to mentor homeless moms. In 2019, it led her to launch a new initiative, Forever Moms, a prison outreach program for incarcerated moms inside the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.
“I want to change the culture in one small way by helping moms in prison and by helping moms who are single and struggling,” she explains. One of the goals of the prison program is to prevent these women’s kids from following in their footsteps. “Children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to go to prison,” she says. “We are trying to stop a legacy of incarceration.”
Although her work was temporarily interrupted when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, over 300 women have gone through the Forever Moms program, which is a 10-week curriculum offering guidance on parenting, relationship building, faith, and finding a job, as well as providing substance abuse resources. The program also aims to counter the shame many incarcerated moms feel about letting their children down, Dean Schmidt says, as well as the mistaken idea that their kids would be better off without them. “The whole world is depending on them to raise their children well,” she says, “so it’s one of the most important jobs on the planet. I just remind them of their great value.”
The program is currently operating at three facilities in two states (Colorado and Arizona), and Dean Schmidt hopes to start in a fourth facility in San Diego in the near future. Forever Moms also has begun supporting moms leaving prison in getting back on their feet, by offering them mentoring and a “success kit” with basic supplies, as well as access to the group’s Compassion Fund, which provides emergency funds. Her data shows the program has had great success in reducing recidivism in the women who have graduated, citing a rate of 21 percent as compared to the national average, which is close to 60 percent.
After becoming a mother, Dean Schmidt says she was feeling purposeless and embarked on a search for meaning, which she eventually found in the Christian faith. She worried her embrace of religion might alienate her ձ friends, and she and her husband, Mike Schmidt ’86 (whom she married in 1989, having first met in nursery school), distanced themselves from their college community for many years. “When I came to Jesus and got a little more conservative, I thought, ’Nobody at ձ is going to understand this,’” she recalls.
That all changed when their daughter, Georgia Schmidt ’25, transferred to Occidental in the fall of 2021 to play volleyball for the Tigers. (The day before Georgia’s Commencement ceremony at ձ, older brother Otis graduated from the University of Arizona Law School. He recently passed the bar and is clerking with the Arizona Supreme Court.)
Despite some misgivings about what she perceives as “the political imbalance” on campus, “We fell back in love with ձ,” Dean Schmidt says. Since then, she and her husband (superintendent at Platte Canyon School District in Bailey, Colo.) have reconnected with some of their old college friends, and she admits to being surprised at finding them “more accepting of our viewpoints than I thought they’d be.”
Today, Georgia is working with her mom as an executive assistant at ChannelMom Media & Outreach, contributing to podcast and media production, event coordination, and social media management. (A new podcast, , dropped its first episode in October.) And as Dean Schmidt continues in her mission, she hopes to telegraph to fellow moms in all circumstances how fundamental they are. “When I was at Occidental, I never thought that my life’s calling would be in prison,” she says. “I march into these places and I’m not afraid. I realize that I’m just one bad parenting decision away from being in prison myself.”
Rebecca Bodenheimer (Mike Chen, Jenny Dean Schmidt) is a freelance writer in Oakland. This is her first article for Occidental magazine. Additional photography courtesy Mike Chen, Tammy Bird, Mike Hoover, and Jenny Dean Schmidt.
