Palisadian Hal Washburn, co-founder and CEO of BreitBurn Energy Partners, is an active member of the Children’s Bureau board and a member of the committee organizing a Celebrity Chefs Wine Tasting on October 10 to benefit the Children’s Bureau.
Other committee members include Palisadians Kris Losito, Ceci Dean and Denise DeSantis.
“This will be a terrific opportunity to mingle with some of the country’s top chefs and talk with folks from featured wineries,” Washburn told the Palisadian-Post. “This is all about raising money to take care of children who don’t have much of a chance to survive and thrive.”
A1982 graduate in petroleum engineering at Stanford, Washburn said he had been active in community happenings while at college, but hadn’t found his niche in Los Angeles until a former Stanford development officer, Carmine Salzucci, came to work at the Children’s Bureau in 2007.
“Carmine was so excited and his enthusiasm was infectious,” said Washburn, who was introduced to Alex Morrow, the head of the Children’s Bureau. “Once I met the people, I wanted to see how I could help, and a few months later I joined the board.”
The Bureau was established in 1904 as a volunteer group to advocate for legislation to protect children. In the 1930s, the nonprofit opened a shelter for homeless and abused children and played a key role in establishing the USC School of Social Work. In the 1940s the Bureau expanded to finding homes for refugee children and war orphans, and during the 1960s it focused on “unadoptable” children. More recently, the emphasis has been on helping families through parent education.
In 2008, the Magnolia Place Family Center, just west of downtown and Koreatown adjacent, opened as a neighborhood center offering a network of 75 nonprofit, government and faith-based community organizations.
The Magnolia Center now helps more than 28,000 children and families each year with school-readiness programs, parenting classes, support groups, mental health counseling, foster care and adoption.
“Our hope is that Magnolia Place will be a model to help families, and by extension children,” Washburn said.
Next Thursday’s fourth annual benefit will be held in the AT&T Center penthouse in downtown L.A. Tickets are available online: all4kids.org/celebritychefs.
Washburn, who has lived in the Palisades since 2001, is the father of five children: Sullivan (21) and Spence (19), who attend Trinity College; Josephine (17), a senior at Campbell Hall; and Chance (13) and Charlotte (12), who attend St. Matthew’s.
His company, BreitBurn Energy, is an independent limited partnership focused on the acquisition, exploitation and development of oil and gas properties in the United States, rather than using foreign sources. The company has a stock market value of $1.8 billion.
According to an L.A. Times story, BreitBurn uses recent advances in computer technology and sophisticated software to analyze seismic data and provide 3-D images of subsurface rock formations to pinpoint oil and gas reservoirs in oil fields that previous owners could not find or didn’t use.
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