Young Storytellers, the Los Angeles nonprofit that brings mentorship and storytelling programs to public school students, has announced the creation of The Jamie Tarses Fund. It is named in memory of the television executive and producer, who was a founding member of the organization’s board and died in 2021.
The fund will support Young Storytellers’ programs in Los Angeles public schools, where volunteer mentors work one-on-one with students to write original scripts that professional actors then perform on stage. The fund will be celebrated on October 29 at The Biggest Show, the organization’s annual event, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.
Tarses began her career as a talent executive at Saturday Night Live and worked as a casting director at Lorimar before joining NBC in 1987. There she helped develop Friends, Mad About You, Frasier and NewsRadio during the network’s Must See TV era. In 1996 she was named president of ABC Entertainment, becoming the first woman to lead a network entertainment division. Her ABC tenure produced The Practice, Spin City, Sports Night and Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.
As an independent producer, Tarses produced My Boys, Mad Love, Happy Endings, Franklin & Bash, The Wilds and The Mysterious Benedict Society.
She became involved with Young Storytellers in the 1990s and joined its founding board in 2003, the year the organization became an independent nonprofit. She served on the board for seven years. During that time she recruited entire writers’ rooms from her comedies, along with some of the biggest stars in the business, to volunteer as mentors.
“Jamie was never happier than when she was helping writers tell their stories,” said her brother, Matt Tarses, co-creator of HBO’s Rooster and executive producer of Bad Monkey, whose credits also include Scrubs and Sports Night. “She had a gift for it and everyone who worked with her benefited tremendously from her guidance. In return, she bullied us into doing the same thing for the kids at Young Storytellers. Of course, it became one of the most joyful and rewarding things I’ve done, as she surely knew it would be. When we were trying to come up with ways to honor her memory, Young Storytellers was the obvious choice.”
“Jamie understood that the most powerful thing you can tell a young person is that their ideas deserve to be taken seriously,” said Jaylene Benggon Chung, Managing Director of Young Storytellers. “She built that belief into this organization, and it is still at the center of everything we do. Because of this fund, the kids who come through our doors will keep feeling her generosity, whether or not they ever learn her name.”
Young Storytellers was started in 1997 by three film students as a volunteer project in a single classroom at Playa del Rey Elementary School. In 2025, 786 volunteers mentored more than 440 students every week at 39 public schools and after-school sites across Los Angeles.
Contributions to the Jamie Tarses Fund can be made on the Young Storytellers website.