Answering the Call

Anderson keeps JEP moving forward

by Pamela Johnson

Tammara Anderson recalled the awkward interview 27 years ago at JEP’s historic bungalow.

It was December 1980 and Anderson, preparing to graduate from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, was applying for a position at USC College’s Joint Educational Project (JEP).

When Anderson arrived, she was surprised to find a gerontology classmate there to interview for the same job with then-executive director Barbara Seaver Gardner. 

“Neither one of us knew the other was coming,” Anderson recalled of her classmate. “Barbara [Gardner] would ask a question and we’d both have to answer it.”

Nearly three decades after being hired to direct a new senior citizen program, Anderson is still just as passionate about what she considers her calling.

“I work with such great folks,” Anderson said, sitting at her desk — inside the same office where that long-ago interview took place. “Such dedicated, wonderful people. With every new batch of students, I think, ‘We’ll never have one as great as that again.’ And then another one comes.”

In 1988, Anderson was promoted to assistant director. Ten years later, she became director and in 2002, when Dick Cone retired after a quarter-century, Anderson took the post of executive director.

“Tammy is Miss Charm,” Cone said by telephone from his San Gabriel home. “Tammy is just perfect for a people job because she can fit into any scene. And she approaches every day with enthusiasm.”

Raised in nearby Baldwin Hills, Anderson went to Catholic schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. Both parents, however, are former public school teachers — her father Alvin taught in the Compton Unified School District and her mother Donella in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They describe their daughter as a high-spirited youngster with insatiable curiosity.

“She was a vivacious, energetic child and it has followed her into adulthood,” Donella Seabrook said. “She had questions for everything and we had to have the answers.”

Anderson has been involved in experiential education — learning that engages students in a real life activity to gain knowledge about a subject — since the early 1980s. In 1987, Anderson became the first African-American to serve on the board of directors of the National Society for Experiential Education.

In 1990, she earned her master’s degree at the USC Rossier School of Education, managing class work and studying around her busy schedule at JEP.

Under her leadership, JEP has become a national model for hands-on learning by undergraduates, fostering learning in which students do field work in the community to enhance what they read or hear about a subject in lectures. In 2004, Anderson earned the USC President’s Award for Staff Achievement.

“Tammy is a person of integrity and good work ethic,” said the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, USC’s holder of the John R. Tansey Chair in Christian Ethics. “She’s just a joy package. She’s what keeps this home alive.”