Giving Back
Some Investments Don’t Show Up on a Balance Sheet
ePublishing has spent 30 years helping media companies and publishers work better, innovate, and grow. That’s the business. But the people behind this company believe the work you do in the world isn’t limited to the work you get paid for.
Born on the Sidelines
Tom Chaffee, ePublishing’s founder and Executive Chairman, co-founded Dreamers Academy in 2017 with his wife, Geri. It’s a tuition-free, dual-language public charter school in Sarasota serving students from kindergarten through eighth grade. Every subject is taught in both English and Spanish by fully bilingual teachers and staff, in a community where most families speak Spanish at home and are raising children in a world that doesn’t always make room for them.
Tom didn’t come to this through a foundation or a giving program. He came to it through years of coaching youth football, working daily with kids from under-resourced neighborhoods, learning their stories, and seeing how closely what happened outside school followed them into the classroom. The mission became personal long before Dreamers Academy existed.
When the chance came to build something that could change those odds, he and Geri didn’t write a check to someone else’s effort. They built it themselves.
The Expertise Behind the Mission
While Tom brought business and governance expertise, Geri brought educational expertise and the passion to make it work. The daughter of Argentinian immigrants who grew up in Puerto Rico, she navigated American schools as an English Language Learner without the tools those schools assumed she had. That experience became her career. She holds a Master of Education from Teachers College at Columbia and a Doctorate from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, and has spent years working on behalf of the children public education most consistently underserves. Dreamers Academy was her chance to do what education rarely allows: start from scratch, reject the defaults, and build something that actually works for the children it’s meant to serve.
Five Years In
Five years in, it does. Dreamers Academy holds a Florida “A” school rating and ranks among the state’s top 10 Title I schools. Title I designation exists because the children in these schools need it most. At Dreamers Academy, nearly 90% of students come from families living below the poverty line. Its students are learning to read, write, and think in two languages, and what that does for a developing mind is unambiguous and extraordinary.
The Real Connection
ePublishing provides the school’s website, technology, and digital infrastructure. But the real connection isn’t technical. This is what ePublishing does when no one is paying us.
That’s who you’re doing business with.