Seth Eklund ’97

Seth Eklund ’97 is a passionate native Angeleno who has committed his entire professional career to the service of the community of the Rampart/Westlake area of Los Angeles. He has risen in the ranks of the nonprofit where he went to work immediately upon graduating from UCLA and is now the executive director of the Bresee Foundation. Eklund’s formative experiences at UCLA directly lead to his skilled execution of the vast array of responsibilities that he now has as an executive at a nonprofit that he calls his “second home and family.”

Eklund attended Loyola High School in central Los Angeles and followed in the footsteps of his older sister Ande Eklund ’94 who enrolled at UCLA two years before he did. While at UCLA, he took an anthropology course that required him to do an internship with a local nonprofit. Eklund and several other classmates decided to run a music class at Step Up on Second – a homeless shelter in Santa Monica for people with mental health issues. He and his classmates supplied musical instruments, held weekly classes and quickly cultivated an engaged group of participants who would play music, sing and lead campfire-type sing-alongs. The experience taught Eklund the importance of nonprofits in building community. He suggests that “every UCLA student should be required to get off campus during college and connect to the city of L.A.”

While a student in the anthropology department at UCLA, Eklund found guidance and a fellow Bruin with a shared interest in urban anthropology in Rosemarie Ashamalla, Ph.D. ’99, his undergraduate advisor. His relationship with Ashamalla led him to look closely at the plight of at-risk youth in L.A. and cemented that cause as one that he wanted to address as a professional.

Eklund got hired at the Bresee Foundation fresh out of college and went to work running the homework, tutoring and scholarship programs. He was there to see the Bresee Foundation transform from several rooms on the third floor of the First Church of the Nazarene to the “Boys & Girls Club ‘on steroids’” of the 15,000 square-foot, first class community center where it is now. The leadership at the Bresee Foundation at that time wanted to give their community something “comparable to what they’d build in Beverly Hills because the youth and families in [their] neighborhood deserved the best.”

The Bresee Foundation offers a holistic array of after school programs including academics, athletics, arts, S.T.E.M., internships and service. Their family services team provides wrap-around support to the parents and family members of the youth involved, including food, transportation, emergency rental assistance, parenting classes and E.S.L. classes. Their gang prevention team works with 75 10-15 year-olds, most at-risk for joining gangs, through the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Gang Reduction & Youth Development program.

Eklund explains that while he received an “incredible education” at UCLA he also enjoyed a “diverse set of experiences that prepared [him] to be an executive director of a nonprofit.” He did building maintenance in the ASUCLA student union, participated in intramural sports, performed at Spring Sing, met President Jimmy Carter in Ackerman Union and worked with the homeless in Santa Monica. Eklund says that the skills developed doing that vast variety of things actually transfer directly to his current position where he is in charge of building maintenance for their large community center, runs soccer programs for more than 400 students, constantly interacts with government officials, books music acts for their dinner galas and continues to work with homeless clients.

When asked about other UCLA connections at the Bresee Foundation, Eklund says that he is most proud of the fact that two of their current Bresee Scholarship recipients who are students at UCLA, Alan Carrillo and Katheryn Munguia, have both worked and volunteered in the high school program for several years. He sites that the two of them “embody Bresee Foundation’s vision of character-driven, creative, college-educated alumni transforming the central L.A. community.” Several other Bresee Foundation staff are also UCLA alumni and over the past decade 10 Bresee Foundation students have gone on to attend UCLA.

Eklund has maintained his passion for service and the Bresee Foundation because of the “amazing people” he works alongside who benefited from the foundation and then return to serve the next generation – more than 40% of the foundation’s staff are former students who prospered there as youth. Looking forward, he says that they would like to replicate the success of the Bresee Foundation and build another first class community center in the high-need area of South L.A.

Eklund met his wife, Dana Cascella ’97 as a sophomore at UCLA. They bonded over a “Get to Know You” karaoke event in Sproul Hall singing The Bangles’ “Manic Monday” and the rest, he says, “is history.” He lives in the community that he serves with his wife and two children.