After growing up in rural Kansas, Sara Ann Buccolo has lived in Los Angeles for the past seven years, loving every minute of it. After earning her BA in Acting from the UCLA School of Theater and Television, Sara Ann has gone to work in the entertainment industry as a floral designer and professional dancer. Her passion for performance and education has recently led her to a position as an arts educator with BluePalm, a grant-funded program bringing performance art workshops to schools in LAUSD. She is currently earning her Single Subject Teaching Credential in Social Science at Cal State Long Beach.

Jason Carvey bought his way out of the bonds of suburban serfdom and came to the magical land of Hollywood to make moving pictures. When he's not employed doing so, he spends his afternoons recalling arithmetic he swore would never be used in real life in an attempt to appear smarter than the fifth graders he is tutoring. His crowning 826LA moment came when he agreed to serve as "professional" illustrator for Barnacle & Barnacle Publishing and managed to convince the second grade authors that the pony he drew was really a pony and absolutely not, in any way, a cow (which it may have closely resembled).

Jason currently resides in Echo Park and enjoys riding bikes, jazzercising, and playing dodgeball. He is pretty certain that becoming a tutor at 826LA is one of the greatest decisions he's ever made.

Silvia de la Peña lives in San Pedro. She rides her bike at the beach a lot and thinks about sea sprites and other imaginary things. Silvia has an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore and loves helping the kids at 826LA make their own books. But her favorite part of being a volunteer is reading the heartbreakingly honest stories of first love written by high school students, because they remind her that though we'd like to think our problems are unique, we are all—no matter our age, ethnicity, or neighborhood—in the same boat, and we all feel the waves.

Staci Steinberger works in Decorative Arts & Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where her responsibilities include parsing old magazines, finding amazing mid-century designs on eBay, and meeting octo- and nonagenarian designers and craftspeople (all research for an upcoming exhibition on California design). As a recent LA transplant, she enjoys exploring the ins and outs of her new city—although she's always proud to teach native Angelenos about all they're missing in the great cities of Akron, OH, and Pittsburgh, PA. In addition to spending weekend afternoons with the fantastic folks of 826LA, she's a compulsive doodler and enjoyed a stint teaching drawing classes and seeing art around town.