My Story
Bruce Saito, is a sansei (third generation) Japanese American. Bruce was born in Norwalk, California sixyears after his parents and grandparents returned to Los Angeles after being incarcerated in Internment Camps in Postin, Arizona.
Bruce began his work with the conservation corps when he was hired by the newly formed CA Conservation Corps in 1977. Bruce was hired as a supervisor/instructor and assigned to the Bret Harte Training Academy in Calaveras County. Over the next 10 years, Bruce served in a variety of supervisor, coordinator, manager and directors at the CCC Santa Clara, San Gabriel, Los Angeles Urban and Camarillo Centers.
In 1986, Bruce helped to establish the non-profit Los Angeles Conservation Corps (LACC) in South Los Angeles. He was initially hired as the Assistant Director and later became the Executive Director in 1995 where he led the LACC until 2015. Durin this 30 year span the LACC developed into one of the largest non-profit corps in the United States, with an annual budget of more than $21,000,000. More importantly, Bruce enrolled and trained more than 20,000 youth and young adults, predominantly from diverse backgrounds and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Communities.
On September 5, 2015 Bruce was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to be the 10 th Director of the CA Conservation Corps. Bruce grew the CCC from a $90,000,000 annual budget to its current capacity of $170,000,000 in 2023 by developing natural resource programs that addressed critical climate and fire resiliency programs as well as life changing corpsmember youth development priorities for more than 1,600 young adults each year. After more than 46 years in public service and the conservation corps movement, Bruce retired from the CCC on November 5, 2023.
Bruce served as the Board Chair for the Corps Network and still serves on the Corps Network’s Board of Directors. Bruce has helped to create many non-profit programs and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the Friends of Manzanar, Little Tokyo Sr. Nutrition Services, Coalition for Responsible Community Development (CRCD), LA Education Corps Charter High School, Los Angeles County Beaches and Harbors Commission, Community Nature Connection, and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust.
Bruce earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Francisco State University in 1976. Bruce and his wife, Alexandra Torres, live in Long Beach.
My Story
Lauren has been working in non-profit development and programming for 15 years while moving across the country with as her active duty husband’s job takes them somewhere near. The last 6 years Lauren spent as Development Director at Urban Corps of San Diego County. While at Urban Corps, Lauren researched, wrote, submitted and managed around $3 million in grant funding a year. Lauren Additionally, Lauren led all large grant management for the organization’s state grants, including most notably the $1.2 million dollar Cal Fire Urban Forestry grant, awarded in 2018 to plant 2000 trees throughout the County. Lauren was a member of the Corpsmember Development team at Urban Corps creating and funding new training programs to support successful job placement including starting new foundational and vocational training pathways for all Corpsmembers.
Lauren’s focus on collaboration and community has caused her to create many community centric opportunities the San Diego community including the San Diego (and then North County) Grant Roundtables serving nonprofit grant writers providing networking, support and guest speakers to ongoing roundtable events. Additionally, in early January 2021, Lauren created a community focused, local day of giving called San Diego Gives. The first ever campaign happened September 9th , 2021 and raised almost $500,000 for over 100 nonprofits in San Diego. The second campaign in September 2022 with 327 nonprofits raised $1,088,000. In 2023, San Diego Gives was granted to nonprofit Impact Cubed to manage and grow.
Giving back to the community and helping others is important to Lauren whether it is in giving back and helping to build up the grant profession locally or help get grants awarded in San Diego or through the creation of San Diego Gives. Lauren also serves as the Vice President for the San Diego Chapter of the Grant Professionals Association where she chairs a committee to put together the first San Diego grant writers conference.
In August 2022, Lauren received her GPC, Grant Professional Certified.