Jan Brenan was a dear friend of the Central Creativity Foundation, and she came to it the way the best people usually do — sideways, through mutual relations at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, with no title and nothing to gain.
What she did once she got there was volunteer. She gave the newly formed Foundation her knowledge and her time, and she spent it on the least glamorous and most consequential thing a young nonprofit can be given: its governance structure and its outreach protocols. Her command of the educational nonprofit world is a large part of why the Foundation became an effective and responsible steward rather than a well-meaning one.
She had been part of it barely a year when she died, in February of 2022, of an aggressive brain tumor.
Where She Came From
Jan hailed from New Orleans, Louisiana. Before the Foundation she was Executive Director of Core Elements, which became GNO STEM, and in 2019 she left to open her own educational consultancy, STEM Matters. She also served as Region 3 Director for LASTEM, Louisiana’s official STEM ecosystem.
That background is why she was useful to a young foundation in a way that had nothing to do with titles. She had spent years watching which students got reached and which ones did not, and she knew exactly how thin the margin between those two groups usually is.
What She Believed
Her argument was simple and she made it often. Put a young learner in front of the careers and the hands-on work that a camp week contains, and the ones who had decided they could not succeed in a STEM field start to revise that decision. Then they do something better than succeed quietly — they go back and tell their friends, and become change agents for other students seeing themselves the same way.
She was talking about exposure, and about who gets it. She was clear that her passion was camp in particular: the experiences built, hosted and run by Central Creativity and its educational site partners across the country.
What the Fund Does
The Foundation created the Jan Brenan Memorial Scholarship Fund in 2022 to honor her memory and her commitment to growing powerful thinkers. It raises money for one purpose: camper participation. Underserved, at-risk and merit-selected learners, at Central Creativity camps across the country.
It is deliberately narrow. Jan’s passion was getting a student into the room, so the fund pays for the seat and leaves the rest to the other funds.