/ About Us /
/ About Us /
Making Waves programs provide students with the educational opportunities, career skills, and financial guidance and assistance to help them meet their goals and thrive. We partner with students from 5th grade through high school, college and early career. The vast majority of our students embark upon adulthood with little or no college debt.
Making Waves Education Foundation supports Making Waves Academy’s success by administering college scholarships, owning and maintaining state-of-the-art school facilities, and stewarding financial resources deployed to the mission.
A society in which all youth—regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status—have access to high-quality educational opportunities and the tools to achieve success.
To advance educational opportunities for college-bound, career-minded, historically underrepresented and underserved youth.
Siobhan McCarthy is Making Waves Education Foundation’s COO. In this role she oversees Finance, HR, Real Estate, and Scholarship disbursement. Siobhan has a degree in accounting from University of San Diego. She enjoys hearing students’ individual stories about their college and career journey.
Regina K. Scully co-founded Making Waves Academy with her husband John H. Scully in 2007. She is deeply committed to educational opportunity as a lever for solving societal and environmental challenges.
Regina is the Founder and CEO of Artemis Rising Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to developing and promoting media, education and the arts to transform our culture.
A social entrepreneur, media activist, and documentary filmmaker, Regina has helped produced over 200 films focused on some of the most pressing social justice issues of our time—gender-parity, the achievement gap, and trauma recovery. Regina is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning and Academy-nominated producer. She is the Founding Sponsor of the Athena Film Festival (NYC), which highlights women in filmmaking.
Her films include Miss Representation (2010), The Invisible War (2012), Anita: Speaking Truth To Power (2013), FED UP (2014), The Hunting Ground (2015), Newtown (2016), Eagle Huntress (2016), Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise (2016), Dolores (2017), One Of Us (2017), Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018), The Biggest Little Farm (2019), The Great Hack (2019), This Changes Everything (2019), Ruth Bader Ginsburg: In Her Own Words (2019), and Fantastic Funghi (2020), What Would Sophia Loren Do? (2021). For a complete list of her films, please visit the Artemis Rising website.
A 30-year veteran in the combined fields of journalism, public relations, brand marketing, and media literacy, she is founder and CEO of RPR Marketing Communications, a premier PR agency in NYC specializing in exclusive consumer products and brands. Regina is also deeply passionate about education reform and has helped launch and support some of the most successful inner city charter schools in the country: Success Academy Schools in New York and Making Waves Academy in Northern California. Regina sits on the Boards of The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; The Women’s Media Center; The Peabody Awards; and Harvard Women’s Leadership Board.
Regina is a graduate of Georgetown University, with concentrations on foreign languages and theology.
Eli Weinberg is the CIO of Filbert Holdings, a private investment partnership that makes concentrated investments in public and private companies. Prior to Filbert Holdings, Eli was the CIO and Managing Partner of SPO Partners & Co.
In addition to serving on the board of the Making Waves Education Foundation, Eli is member of the Board of Trustees of The San Francisco Day School and Tract.
Eli received his BA from Amherst College in 1999 and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He resides in San Francisco with his wife, Leigha, and two daughters, Margot and Annie.
Mary Jane Burke is a proven leader who brings people together and accomplishes great things for our community.
In a record 28 years as Marin County’s elected Superintendent of Schools, Mary Jane consistently proved her leadership skills by tackling society’s biggest challenges, bringing together disparate factions, and achieving countless positive results. Mary Jane has stood up for racial equality, provided quality education to society’s most marginalized children—including those with addiction issues, mental health challenges and other special needs. With oversight that extends to 19 public school districts serving 40,000 students, from pre-school to community college, with budgets totaling more than $600 million, Mary Jane has demonstrated the financial acumen to overcome cuts and meet new mandates.
She helped launch SchoolsRule, a fundraising organization that in its first decade has distributed more than $6.2 million to ensure all students have access to the same educational opportunities.
Mary Jane has a BA and MA from Dominican University of California.
Alicia Malet Klein joined our Making Waves Education Foundation board in 1999 and is also president of the Making Waves Academy board. She is the primary liaison to staff on operational issues and board lead on school facility and design projects.
Her commitment to educational equity is evidenced not just by her work for Making Waves, but also by her leadership of the district-wide foundation for San Rafael City Schools. Alicia began her deep involvement in education, after a brief career in advertising, in the mid-1990s. She served as a Bay Area Discovery Museum trustee, held a variety of parent leadership positions in San Rafael schools, worked weekly in elementary classrooms for years, and taught GATE classes for 4th and 5th graders from 2003-2020.
Following the passage of major school improvement bonds, she chaired facilities renovation committees for multiple sites in that district, where she still participates in budget advisory committees and parent outreach activities.
Alicia received degrees in both economics and Italian from Stanford University. She and her husband Tom have two sons and two grandchildren.
For more than 30 years, Making Waves has been committed to educational equity. In 1989, John H. Scully and the late Reverend Eugene Farlough founded Making Waves Education Program as an after-school program in Richmond, California, starting with nearly 50 students in 5th grade.
Since then, knowing the power of education, Making Waves has grown to reach more Bay Area students, families, and communities.
Making Waves Academy, a top-performing tuition-free public charter school in Richmond, California was founded by John H. Scully and his wife Regina K. Scully in 2007.
Now enrolling more than 1,100 students in 5th through 12th grade, Making Waves Academy offers academics, social-emotional support, and college and career programming at its state-of-the-art campus.
Making Waves Education Foundation is dedicated to supporting Making Waves Academy. Our flagship college and career success program is merging with Making Waves Academy in June 2027 to creating a one seamless college and career for all model that connects students from 5th grade to college and career.
Our students proudly refer to themselves as “Wave-Makers.” Since our founding, the majority of our Wave-Makers are people of color, are from low-income backgrounds, and are first-generation college students or graduates. There are over 1,400 Wave-Makers across Making Waves programs and over 860 all-time college degrees recipients from universities across the U.S.
With your support, Wave-Makers are becoming the next generation of leaders.