Innovation Campaign Donor Spotlight The Champa Family

Innovation Campaign Donor Spotlight

The Champa Family

The field of educational neuroscience has shown us that teenagers are exquisitely primed to thrive when their brains are developing. This stage of extreme neuroplasticity is a window of opportunity for kids to learn, adapt, evolve and become functionally smarter. In other words, children are ripe for learning until their frontal cortex is closed!

I’ve always taught my son, Sean, now a rising Senior, that the biggest adventures can be found in books, opening his heart and mind to the world. Sean chose Windward for Middle School after the devastating loss of his father, my husband, Joe. He had friends who attended and I knew parents who I respected, particularly when it came to their educational choices for their children. The connections were important and so was the supportive environment which provided a very warm welcome to a boy who had lost his dad.

As a family with dual citizenship—Italian and American--Windward turned out to be the perfect place. For us, it has been a blending of cultures, a community of parents who are down to earth and care tremendously about their children, an education that is both academically rigorous but with access to the arts, music and humanities and, importantly, an approachable and attentive administration. Luckily, Sean has also benefited from some absolutely outstanding, passionate teachers, educators for whom he works harder because of their enthusiasm and encouragement. Windward partners with parents so that students can become citizens of the world with important character traits such as honesty, empathy, tenacity, and optimism. The school doesn’t make products, it makes human beings.

As an ardent believer in childhood education, I’ve often said that no matter what you face, education can never be taken away from you, and so the goal is to acquire as much of it as possible. My father was a farmer’s son from the poorest region in Southern Italy. Through hard work and perseverance at school, he rose to become a renowned cardiothoracic vascular surgeon. My husband, the son of Irish immigrants, was born impoverished in a tenement house on the rough and tumble Lower East Side of New York City. He was a grateful recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to Harvard Law School and ended up profoundly impacting the entertainment industry.

I’ve traveled the world and seen so much potential go to waste. And so, I’ve helped build schools in Cambodia and volunteered in India. I can only imagine what the lives of those children would be if they had access to a school like Windward. Education is the way out from crushing poverty. When people ask me why I give, I answer, “Why wouldn’t anyone give if they had the resources to change even just one person’s life?” What drives me is my desire for as many children as possible to have the same opportunities as Sean. Simultaneously, I get to model philanthropy for my son within the critical field of education. The Innovation Campaign propels Windward to the next level, maintaining the School’s relevance in a faster changing world so students can be global citizens of today and tomorrow.

- Jo Champa

Parent of Sean ’23