How A Private School Village Raised $4 Million And Brought LA’s Diverse Students Together

Last weekend, over 2500 parents and students who attend private schools across Los Angeles, gathered at Exposition Park to celebrate the ‘Back to School’ season.

The annual event was organized by Private School Village (PSV), a non-profit community established to address the cultural gaps that schools often overlook by pooling resources, providing programming, and building networks of support, visibility, and representation.

However, what makes this event unique is that it’s explicitly and intentionally designed to empower Black and brown families—encompassing students and parents alike—who are enrolled in a private school.

According to the most recent federal data 4.7 million (K-12) students are enrolled in private schools versus the estimated 49.2 million students enrolled in public schools. Of those in private school, only 6% are Black, less than half of the demographic percentage of Black Americans (14.4%).

For PSV’s founder and executive director, Lisa Johnson, the low representation underscored the need for a curated community to provide a support system. For Lisa, “It takes a village to raise a child” was not simply a well-known African proverb; its a phrase that would become her guiding principle, sparking her passion and the opportunity to build one.

From A Park Playdate To Movement

In the heart of Los Angeles, behind manicured hedges and historic gates, sit some of the country’s most elite private schools. From Harvard-Westlake to Sierra Canyon and beyond, there are currently 255 private schools tasked with educating nearly 47,000 students annually.

For many parents, their child’s acceptance into a private school may be the golden ticket to future opportunities. Still, for some students, entrance comes with invisible challenges, such as social isolation, unacknowledged cultural needs, and a lack of seeing others who look like them.

In 2018, when Lisa and her husband, Andre Johnson, enrolled their son, Avery, and daughter, Gigi, in kindergarten and 4th grade, they wanted to ensure the learning, development, and grounding didn’t stop on weekends. Lisa, having experienced being one of a handful of Black students in her Atlanta independent school growing up, was surprised as a parent to find how little progress had been made. Many identity and culturally based initiatives lacked support, depth, and consistency.

This observation sparked her desire to create a cultural and creative space for the children and families most impacted by this —something she had once imagined for herself.

Lisa recruited a small group of parents and began humbly by setting up park playdates and inviting other Black parents who felt the same way to join them. For her first playdate event, she had hoped 50 people would come. Over 500 showed up.

What had started as crowdsourced playdates across Los Angeles parks, quickly became the roots upon which the opportunity to increase and improve programs could grow. To do that, Lisa began garnering donations from parents, businesses and local organizations who could benefit from this newly formed “village” and contribute to its growth. In its first year, PSV raised $28,500 through fundraising efforts.

Today, seven years later, PSV has raised an aggregate of nearly $4 million, despite the challenges of COVID and the devastating LA wildfires. With the support of the village, PSV’s financial growth is outpacing many national education nonprofits, and is driven by the demand for the community.

“School partners provide a consistent level of financial support, but it is the generosity of donors that sustains our mission. Sometimes people only see what’s in front of them — the joy of showing up to an event or program — without realizing that every single dollar above the price of a low-to-no cost ticket is required to bring this to life. So this movement isn’t just about raising more money; it’s an opportunity to help families understand the power of philanthropy and what it means to invest in something that feeds back into the leaders of tomorrow.”

Since its founding, PSV has worked directly with nearly 100 schools throughout Los Angeles, Pasadena, and now the Northern California region, serving more than 8,500 students and their families. What started out as a simple gathering has turned into a movement where parents feel educated and empowered, and schools have embarked on a new path to engagement.

The Double-Edged Sword of Privilege

While private schools deliver rigorous