by Mark McDermott
Any early evening on a late spring day in Manhattan Beach is already a wonder to behold. The briskness in the air and the golden sheen of the day’s slow-departing sunshine anoint the coming night with a feeling of celebratory ease.
But on one such night every May or early June, an actual celebration occurs. It is a gathering unlike any other, without which Manhattan Beach would be a lesser place. At the Manhattan Wine Auction, nearly 2,500 of the town’s ebullient citizenry come together in support of their schools. The event, which takes place at the Manhattan Beach Country Club, is now in its 32nd year. The Wine Auction is both the signature event of the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation and of the city itself. It has raised $25 million for the Manhattan Beach Unified School District over its history and has been a catalyst for the more than $120 million MBEF has contributed to MBUSD overall — including an unusual $28 million endowment that itself contributes $1.4 million each year. These contributions have made MBEF the most effective public school education foundation in the state of California.
Yet as impressive as the numbers are, they don’t capture what unfolds on the night itself. More than a century ago, French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term collective effervescence to describe a kind of heightened, almost reverent energy that arises when a community gathers around something it cares about together. He had ancient religious rites in mind. The term has since been applied to what occurs among fans at sports stadiums and music concerts.
The Manhattan Wine Auction, however, might just be Exhibit A for modern-day collective effervescence. Rich Weiss has poured wine at the event for more than 20 years. He has his own word for the feeling.
“It’s like champagne,” he said.
“You cannot walk the courts of the Manhattan Country Club, without just seeing smiles radiating,” said Hilary Mahan, MBEF’s executive director.
The country club, on the night of the Wine Auction, becomes something else entirely. Six tennis courts are converted into a small, temporary village, ringed by more than 45 of the South Bay’s best restaurants and more than 80 wineries, breweries, and distilleries. The entrance, in the early evening, is its own kind of theater. There is something of the red carpet about it , without the red carpet — a long procession of arriving guests, recognizing and greeting one another — but the dress code is pure Manhattan Beach. Bright dresses, open collars, sandals as often as heels, no one quite formal and no one quite casual. The town has, over the years, perfected a particular kind of lightly worn sophistication, and the Wine Auction swings with that kind of style.
The people coming through the door are a who’s-who of the South Bay. State senators and assemblymembers. The mayor and city council. School board members and the superintendent. Past MBEF presidents stretching back three decades. The CEOs and chairs of some of the largest companies headquartered in the region — Skechers, Continental Development, Chevron — alongside founders of restaurants whose kitchens are, on this particular night, set up in pop-up stations across the courts. There are families who have attended every Wine Auction since the first one in 1995, and there are first-time guests. There are teachers of the year, sitting at center court tables donated by longtime MBEF supporters. There are young parents who came up through MBUSD and are now bringing their own children through the same schools.
Lisa Quarello, who is co-chairing this year’s Wine Auction with Jake Dax, has been trying for a few years to bring a slightly more solemn note to the proceedings — a deeper acknowledgment of the mission underneath the celebration. She has mostly conceded that the room won’t have it.
“There’s no way to not make it a party,” Quarello said. “I think it might be a lost cause.”
What she has seen instead, every year, is the overworn adage “It takes a village” come to vibrant life.
“You see the village,” Quarello said. “And you also can imagine the village, as if everyone who has supported it over those 32 years could be in that room.”
Every year, between 3:30 and 5 p.m. on the evening of the Wine Auction, Mahan stations herself at the entrance to the country club. She knows that once she steps onto the tennis courts, she will be swept up — pulled into conversations, happily waylaid by donors, catching up with everyone. So she allows herself the first 90 minutes of the night at the door to watch the village arrive.
“There’s all this great joy coming in, and you get to see everyone,” Mahan said.
What she sees, year after year, is something that has deepened with time.
“It’s a collective effort among a variety of stakeholders — whether we’re talking about parents, teachers, students, neighbors, or residents,” Mahan said. “But it’s also collective over generations, and the layer upon layer of support and how deep we can go with these connections and how they build is truly phenomenal. And that’s what you find at our Manhattan Wine Auction. Walking in, looking out amongst the guests, talking with people who have been there since the very first — 32 years ago — who keep coming back for the same reasons. It’s truly one of those moments that you can’t capture in any typical event.”
The Foundation regularly fields calls from surrounding communities trying to launch their own food and wine festivals modeled on what MBEF has built. Mahan offers what guidance she is able, but in full knowledge that the uniqueness of the Wine Auction isn’t transferable.
“You just can’t replicate it,” Mahan said. “Because it’s built into our fabric. The guests aren’t here only to have a good time and try what one of these restaurants is serving, or the new cult wine. They’re there also because they know they’re part of a group, part of a collective commitment to our school system and our community of Manhattan Beach. And there’s just no way to duplicate that.”
This year’s edition takes place Saturday, June 6. The theme is Future in Bloom.
“It’s about paying it forward,” Mahan said. “It’s about bringing people together to create beauty. And that’s what I hope everyone who comes to the event will feel and be part of this year.”
Congregating for a cause
Manhattan Beach arrived at this particular form of collective self-expression by a combination of necessity and happenstance. If the Wine Auction is a party, it is a party that meets an increasingly urgent need. MBUSD schools have been in the crosshairs of a slowly unfolding financial disaster that has only been averted by what MBEF has achieved.
When voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978, the intention was to control skyrocketing property taxes. The unintended consequence was the dismantling of what had been one of the nation’s best-funded school systems. By routing property taxes away from local agencies, Prop. 13 stripped districts of control over their own revenue, leaving them dependent on a state government whose budget whipsawed with the larger economic forces at play.
Forty-eight years later, the damage is still being calculated. California’s per-pupil funding ranking sat as low as 46th nationally during the 2010s and has only recently climbed to the mid-30s. The recovery has been driven by reforms that disadvantage Manhattan Beach in particular — most consequentially the Local Control Funding Formula, enacted in 2013, which directs state education dollars toward districts serving higher percentages of low-income, foster, and English-learner students. The underlying idea is one of equity in education. The unintended consequence for MBUSD is that the district is now among the lowest funded districts in California on a per-pupil basis.
MBUSD has managed to remain among the state’s highest academically achieving school districts in no small part because, four decades ago, a small group of people saw the disaster coming.
The Manhattan Beach Education Foundation was founded in 1983, five years after Prop. 13, by parents who recognized that the state was no longer going to fund local schools at the level Manhattan Beach expected of them. For its first few years, MBEF operated as most education foundations did — making small grants for specific purposes.
Then Brad Jones became president.
Jones was an unlikely figure to lead a community education foundation. The Palos Verdes native moved to Manhattan Beach after college. He had earned a chemistry degree at Harvard in three years, stayed for a fourth to get a master’s in physics, and then gone to Stanford for a joint JD/MBA. He met Quinn Barrow, who has since become the longtime Manhattan Beach City Attorney, on the sidelines of an AYSO soccer field. Decades later, Barrow is still astonished by Jones.
“Brad Jones is a genius. He is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” Barrow said. “And it is unbelievable how generous he is.”
Under Jones’s leadership, MBEF made a decision that would prove to be one of the most consequential acts of long-range thinking in the history of Manhattan Beach civic life. In 1986, the foundation created an endowment, seeded with $10,000.
The reasoning was practical. The Foundation’s one-year grants weren’t solving the problem they were meant to solve.
“The endowment started shortly after I became president of the Education Foundation, because I decided we needed a way to fund ongoing programs in the elementary schools, like art and music,” Jones said. “Up until then, the Foundation had been making one-off grants for specific purposes, but it didn’t have the ability to fund ongoing programs, and the district was reluctant to hire people for a program that was only funded for one year… We needed a way to guarantee funding across multiple years.”
Initially, MBEF directed 10 to 20 percent of every donation into the new endowment to seed its growth. The model worked, but it needed a larger funding source.
That source arrived a few years later. MBEF had been holding a Halloween costume party at Bristol Farms for several years — a beloved community event that, by the early 1990s, had grown as large as the venue could allow. The board wanted something with more capacity to grow.
“Everybody was into wine,” Jones said. “So why not? Seemed like a good idea.”
The first Wine Auction was held at the Manhattan Beach Country Club in 1995. It featured 15 restaurants and 10 wineries, drew a few hundred people, and barely broke even.
The early Wine Auctions were essentially run by two people: Dr. Greg Rosen and Carlos Lopes, who together formed what came to be called the Wine Advisory Board. Lopes brought connections — he could get United Airlines to donate travel packages for the auction, and he had ties to the Bel Air Country Club, the famously exclusive club. By Barrow’s account, Lopes obtained highly desirable auction lots, and Rosen did the rest of the actual organizational work, with the assistance of co-chairs Chuck Kaminski and Sherry Kramer.
Around 2002, Rosen approached Barrow at a dinner. His children were getting older. He needed to hand off the Wine Advisory Board. Would Barrow take it?
Barrow agreed, on the condition he could recruit help. He brought in four others: Rich Weiss, John Oshiro, Jeff Thaler, and Randy Dotemoto. Those five became the operational core of the Wine Auction for the next decade — pouring wine they had donated themselves, organizing the tasting tables, and building relationships that would feed the auction’s growth.
Like Rosen before him, Thaler’s role in the WAB grew larger and larger until he essentially did all of the prep work, working closely with Oshiro and former school board member Penny Bordokas, as well as subsequent Wine Advisory chairpersons.
Barrow’s most consequential operational change came almost immediately after he took the helm of the WAB. He discovered that the Wine Auction had been purchasing wine from a local resident to serve at the event — paying for the wine it was then pouring.
“That’s ridiculous,” Barrow said. So the new Wine Advisory Board began donating the wine themselves, and they made sure the wines they poured were also the wines being auctioned that night. If a guest asked, “Where can I get this?” the answer was lot 14, or lot 12. Place a bid.
It was a small structural change. It was also exactly the kind of thinking that would, in compounding form, make the Wine Auction what it became.
“I had no idea it’d get to be as big as it is,” Jones said. “We had much more modest aims at the time.”
Paying it forward
If MBEF’s founding was Brad Jones’s act of foresight, the MBEF Endowment’s flourishing has been the work of the man being honored at this year’s Wine Auction.
The MBEF Legacy Award, introduced in 2020, recognizes individuals who have demonstrated an exceptional commitment to the foundation’s mission. Past recipients include Chevron’s Rod Spackman, the Pipkin family, the Greenberg family, Brad and Joan Jones, John Oshiro, and last year, Melanie and Richard Lundquist.
This year’s honoree is Rich Weiss.
He is, characteristically, more inclined to deflect than to accept.
“Obviously I’m honored,” Weiss said. “But even more so, I am grateful. Grateful to have lived in the South Bay for the past 40 years — married here and raised three beautiful daughters who went through the public school system. Grateful for all the Ed Foundation and the Wine Auction have done for my kids, for our school system, for our community — and, indirectly, for our home prices.”
This last sentiment, regarding home prices, arrived via text with a winking emoji. For Weiss, the foundation’s quintessential money man, this work has never been about money.
Weiss has been on the boards of MBEF and the MBEF Endowment for 22 years. For most of that time he has served as Chief Investment Officer of the MBEF Endowment — the steward of Brad Jones’s modest 1986 idea.
By day, Weiss is a 43-year veteran of the investment management industry. He currently serves as Chief Investment Officer of the Multi-Asset Strategies division at American Century Investments, where he oversees a team responsible for roughly $40 billion in assets. He is a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business News. He holds a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School and an MBA in finance and econometrics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
That a man with that résumé has spent more than two decades managing a community endowment as a volunteer, in his spare time, is one of the central reasons the MBEF Endowment has grown the way it has.
Weiss came into the Wine Auction the way most of its founding figures did — through wine, and through friendship. Quinn Barrow, knowing Weiss as a fellow wine collector, recruited him over dinner at a sushi restaurant. What Weiss found, when he arrived at MBEF, was an endowment of a few million dollars that local financial advisors were already circling, eager to manage the assets and collect the fees.
Weiss had a different idea.
“They had a couple of million dollars at the time,” Weiss said. “And there were various financial advisors who lived in the area who were eager to manage that money for them. And I knew enough to know that it should be managed in a passive way.”
What Weiss meant by passive was institutional-grade discipline applied to a community fund. Index funds at a small fraction of the cost — roughly one-twentieth of what actively managed accounts would have charged. Over the course of two decades and what is now a $28 million endowment, the difference compounds into hundreds of thousands of dollars a year saved.
But the more important contribution was structural. Weiss drafted the Investment Policy Statement that governs the MBEF Endowment to this day. Weiss drafted the Investment Policy Statement that governs the MBEF Endowment to this day — and he wrote into it a clause prohibiting any member of the investment committee, or their firm, from being paid to manage the fund’s money
“We can’t have anybody managing the money on the investment committee,” Weiss said. “It’s a conflict, right? It would be like Congressmen actively trading.”
He also wrote into the policy what he considers the most important rule the foundation operates by: a 5% annual distribution rate.
The rule is calibrated to fit within California’s Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, which governs how nonprofit endowments may spend their assets. UPMIFA doesn’t dictate a specific percentage, but it creates a presumption of imprudence at spending rates above 7 percent. Five percent sits comfortably inside the prudence range, and it matches the spending discipline used by every major university endowment in the country — Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the rest. Each year, the MBEF Endowment distributes roughly 5 percent of its asset value to fund MBEF grants. Investment returns above that 5 percent stay in the fund and continue to compound.
Jake Dax, this year’s Wine Auction co-chair and a private wealth advisor, who has worked closely with Weiss for over a decade, describes the discipline through a metaphor.
“You don’t want to chop down the tree to get the fruit,” Dax said. “You want to keep the tree intact. And so the way you keep the tree intact is just take the fruit and use it to fund what your mission is. And it just keeps producing more and more fruit.”
Today, with the Endowment at $28 million, the 5 percent distribution generates approximately $1.4 million each year for Manhattan Beach schools — every year, regardless of the economic cycle, regardless of state funding fluctuations, regardless of whether next year’s annual appeal hits its target. It is a structural promise to the schools. And it is the closest thing Manhattan Beach has to a permanent answer to the funding system that has failed it.
The discipline was tested in 2008. The Endowment was still relatively young, the market was collapsing, and the temptation to pull back into cash was real.
“The board could have panicked and tried to time the market and pull everything out at the worst time,” Weiss said. “We didn’t. We did the right thing. We stayed the course. And so a lot of credit goes back to the investment committee back then.”
The Endowment held. In the long bull market that followed, it grew. According to MBEF’s program for this year’s event, Weiss has been the driving force behind two of the foundation’s most consequential structural decisions: he led the $20 Million by 2020 campaign, which grew the Endowment past that milestone, and he was the architect of the decision to dedicate the proceeds of the Manhattan Wine Auction specifically to the Endowment — rather than to year-by-year program grants.
That last decision is the structural masterstroke that ties the whole model together. It means the Wine Auction is not, strictly speaking, a fundraiser for next year’s classroom. It is a fundraiser for the next generation’s classroom.
“Harvard, Yale, Stanford’s endowments got nothing on us as far as performance goes,” Weiss said. “And to take 5 percent off the top each year for a decade or two, and still be where we are today, is just remarkable… It just shows you the power of disciplined investing.”
Endowments such as this are usually attached to private schools. What MBEF achieves, both through its annual drive and the building of the Endowment, is something Weiss considers nearly unique in American public education.
“This is unique pretty much to Manhattan Beach and a handful of other communities in California, where basically families are adding to what the state funds for the school system. It’s what affords our kids music programs and special sports programs and lower student-to-teacher ratios. All the things you enjoy in a private school, the Ed Foundation and the Endowment help to supply through our public schools so that you don’t have to send your kid to private school.”
“To me,” he said, “it’s a free private school.”
He attributes most of the endowment’s performance to the long bull market and to “the team” who built MBEF before him.
His hope, looking forward, is that the structure he helped build can become large enough to free the community from its annual fundraising cycle entirely.
“Hopefully it will be $100 million someday,” Weiss said. “So that it would be ticking off every year $5 million — which would mean it covers the whole annual appeal. That would be amazing.”
That vision is now an organized push. At this year’s Wine Auction, Hilary Mahan will launch Grow $5 Million in Five Years, a new Endowment campaign — the first major endowment-focused push since the $20 Million by 2020 effort Weiss led a decade ago. The Paddle Raise this year, traditionally directed to current-year program needs, will be redirected to the Endowment campaign.
The timing — honoring Rich Weiss at the same Wine Auction that kicks off the next phase of the work he started — is not lost on Mahan.
“The most exciting thing for me is we’re doing this in a year when cuts are dramatic,” Mahan said. “So it would be easy to once more say, hey, let’s deflect. Let’s not focus on the Endowment, and let’s really just go out to the community again to give more, to only focus on our teachers and impact next year — which is important, no doubt. But we’ve pushed this off now since our $20 Million by 2020 campaign, and it’s time to reignite this. And we’re now in the place where people are understanding just how important it is to create our own local source of sustainable funding, because it’s not coming from the state.”
Weiss’s contribution, ultimately, is the most invisible kind of civic gift. Most of the 2,500 people who will walk into the Manhattan Country Club on June 6 have no idea what the MBEF Endowment is or how it is invested. They will not know about the clause Weiss wrote into the Investment Policy Statement to prevent conflicts of interest — no one on the investment committee, including Weiss himself, is paid to manage the fund. They will not know about the 5 percent rule or the 2008 stress test.
What they will know — what they feel in the air when they walk in — is that something about Manhattan Beach works in a way that other places do not. The reason it works is downstream decisions by people they will probably never meet, made in living rooms and at sushi restaurants and on AYSO sidelines decades ago.
For all of it, Weiss talks not about the Endowment, or the 5 percent rule, or the $40 billion he manages by day. He talks about a teacher named Lee Marcus.
About two weeks before he was named the 2026 Legacy honoree, Weiss learned that Marcus had passed away. They had stayed in touch for 50 years.
Marcus had been Weiss’s social studies teacher in seventh grade, in New York City. Weiss describes the school he attended as “like a friggin’ zoo” — junior high and high school combined, 400 kids in ninth grade, dropping to 200 or 250 in tenth because the law allowed students to drop out at 16 without parental consent, and most of them did. Many got married. Several had been held back three years in a row and were 21 years old, sitting in classrooms with kids who weren’t yet through puberty.
“I can appreciate the Manhattan Beach school district coming from where I came from,” Weiss said.
He’s not sure he would have made it through if not for Marcus.
“He was a great teacher,” Weiss said. “Just one of these guys who reached students and is a lasting memory for me, and hundreds, if not thousands of other kids who had his class. He didn’t just teach from the textbook. He was so memorable that I could still tell you some of the activities he had in his social studies class. And I hated social studies — boring, history, bullshit — but he made it so interesting.”
Weiss spent four years after high school at Wharton, then two more at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has spent the four decades since at the highest levels of American institutional investment management. He has worked alongside some of the most accomplished economic minds in the country.
“There were some brilliant teachers at both Penn and Chicago,” Weiss said. “But none can hold a candle to this guy in terms of impact and enthusiasm and energy. It was more than just the knowledge he taught. It was just how he reached you. He knew how to connect.”
The Endowment, the Wine Auction, the 22 years on the boards, the volunteer hours, the wine donated, the IPS clause, the 5 percent rule — Weiss’s connection to all of it traces back to a single social studies class in a tough New York City public school more than 50 years ago.
“The fact that I have that memory about a teacher — that’s why I have, I think, in part, a soft spot in my heart for the Ed Foundation,” Weiss said. “Because you can get teachers like that who can affect your lives.”
MBEF Endowment exists to protect the conditions under which the next generation of Lee Marcuses do their work. That is what the 5 percent comes off the top each year for. That is why the principal stays in the ground, growing. That is what Future in Bloom means.
Barrow marvels at the impact Weiss himself has had on generations of local kids locally.
“His kids are long gone from the Manhattan Beach Unified School District, and he’s still heavily involved in raising funds, getting funds, organizing things, making good investments. And so it is more of a community. It’s not just, I’m going to do this to help my kids.”
The village, in the end, is what Weiss returns to.
“It takes a village, as they say,” Weiss said. “Dozens, hundreds, and thousands of volunteers over the years and decades to support our kids, schools, and the community. It’s a beautiful collaborative effort that hopefully continues to get passed on from generation to generation.”
Grit and grind
The Endowment’s quiet discipline is the kind of work that compounds invisibly over decades. But it is not the kind of work that, by itself, builds a community. What builds the community is the other work — the labor that happens in the months and weeks before the night, in living rooms and warehouses and email chains, almost entirely out of public view.
That work is the other thing Manhattan Beach has been building for 32 years. It is the work that John Oshiro, perhaps more than any single person in the foundation’s history, has embodied.
Oshiro received the MBEF Legacy Award in 2024. He served on the foundation’s executive board for nine years and as chairperson of the Wine Auction itself. His daughter came up through MBUSD, and he poured himself into the music programs that ushered her along. When the Mira Costa orchestra was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, the trip needed someone to drive the instruments across the country. Oshiro drove the U-Haul.
He has done that kind of work, in one form or another, for more than two decades. He has been MBEF’s unofficial IT support, the person Hilary Mahan calls when something in the office breaks. He has been a quiet, persistent advocate for every parcel tax measure the district has brought to voters.
Rich Janson is another link in that chain. Janson co-chaired the Wine Auction for three years, alongside Rachel Disser, beginning in 2020. He had come to the work years earlier through his friend Ken Bush, who handed him a spreadsheet and asked him to take over collecting wine donations. Janson, a software engineer, wrote a database to better do the job.
What drew him in was not what draws most people to high-profile civic roles.
“I didn’t have a lot of money at that time,” Janson said. “We couldn’t donate a whole lot. But the thing I did have was time. Some guys can write a lot of checks. I can’t write a lot of checks. But I can spend a lot of time helping out.”
Most of the Wine Auction’s labor happens far from the Country Club tennis courts. It happens, for example, in a cramped wine cellar in Hermosa Beach, where a small group of volunteers spend evenings folding boxes, packing donated bottles, and stacking them for transport.
“There’s a group of guys every year who just show up and say, what do I need to do?” Janson said. “Just point in a direction. They don’t complain that the job they’re asked to do is, okay, fold 20 of those boxes and stack them up over there. People who could be doing a lot of more interesting things with their time are happy to give up that time to get out and help out.”
And the event itself takes a small army of volunteers to put together. Rich Weiss is part of that army. The MBEF program for this year’s event lists him, alongside his various official roles, as a “sign-hanging captain” — a reference to his habit of spending the day of the Wine Auction hanging signs across the country club grounds. “It’s good exercise,” he said, “and I know I’m going to be drinking that night. I want to make room for the calories.”
The most severe test of that labor came in 2020. The Country Club was unavailable. The 26th annual Manhattan Wine Auction had a choice — cancel, or attempt something that had never been done before. Janson and Disser, in their first year as co-chairs, chose the second option. The event was held on May 30, 2020, streamed live, and watched in real time by more than 1,000 households across Manhattan Beach. Local restaurants delivered meals. Wineries sent tasting kits. The Paddle Raise unfolded over a livestream from couches and backyards. The event raised more than $1 million.
The numerical achievement was significant. What Janson remembers, however, is something else.
“That can’t be it,” Janson said of the moment the first virtual event ended. “I’m having fun. Like, let’s keep going. So many people — we were texting at the time — felt the same way. I can’t believe how cool that was, how connected we all felt.”
The virtual auction worked because the memory of the in-person event carried it. People knew what they were participating in because they had stood on the tennis courts in years past and felt what it felt like. The pandemic year was an exception, built on the foundation of everything that had come before.
Manhattan Beach has changed a great deal in the past three decades. The one thing that has not changed is the collective commitment to raising its children and keeping its schools strong. The Wine Auction is both a celebration and a continuation of that commitment.
Mahan has played a key role in holding the apparatus together for the last decade. Her particular gift, Janson said, combines the discipline to attend to every granular detail while also empowering the people around her to do their best work.
“No detail will get past her,” Janson said. “But she’s smart enough to realize she can’t physically do all of the jobs herself. She does a great job of delegating — not commanding, but delegating. Getting people to do the things that they’re good at, or they’re interested in. And then coming by and checking in, and making sure it’s done well. But not giving people the feeling they’re being watched over, or not trusted.”
The Wine Auction, of course, is never the work of any one person. But every year for 32 years, someone has had to be the person who holds it all together — and the apparatus, somehow, has continued to hold.
The village people
The village Weiss describes is not abstract. It can be traced.
Brad Jones recruited Quinn Barrow on an AYSO soccer field. Greg Rosen recruited Barrow over dinner. Barrow recruited Rich Weiss at a sushi restaurant. Weiss, more than a decade ago, recruited Jake Dax.
“Rich and I are both wine guys,” Dax said. “He invited me to the Wine Auction, gosh, probably 13 years ago. So that was my first introduction to it… I just remember thinking, this is exactly the type of event that I want to be part of. The energy, all the great people, friends, family, all there together — it was just super impressive.”
Dax was a young financial advisor at the time. He didn’t yet have children in the school district; he and his wife wouldn’t have their first child for another four years. But the night did something to him.
“I remember thinking, gosh, the size and the scale of this thing, all to support our local public school system — like, where else does that happen?” Dax said. “I knew right away that when I have a family, I want to be part of this….This is the type of community I want to live in.”
Dax has been involved ever since. He served on the Wine Advisory Board, then chaired the Wine Auction in 2023, then co-chaired it again in 2025 with Lisa Quarello. This year he and Quarello are co-chairing again.
What keeps pulling him back is what keeps everyone coming back. The night functions as something close to a community reunion.
“You’ll see your old friends whom you haven’t seen in a long time,” Dax said. “It’s the one night where everybody seems to come back together.”
The cross-section of life present at the Wine Auction — generations of families, decades old friends, neighbors who haven’t lived next door in years — is what Quarello sees too. She recalled a recent pre-auction gathering at Tin Roof Bistro. Generations of MBEF supporters were in the room, some of them with children long out of MBUSD.
“One of them said to me, ‘Now our kids have grown, but it’s all about gratitude,’” Quarello said. “Gratitude for being able to walk my kids to school. It’s gratitude for the friendships that they’ve made in their neighborhood. It’s gratitude for not paying private school tuition. Being able to have your children go to school in their own neighborhood is really priceless.”
The gratitude Quarello and Dax describe is, more than anything, what the Wine Auction has become a celebration of. The schools are the ostensible reason for the gathering. But the gratitude is for the community itself, and what it has chosen to be over more than three decades of consistent showing-up.
“There’s this much deeper awareness in the community right now that MBEF funding is not extra,” Quarello said. “It’s absolutely essential.”
What makes the Wine Auction’s financial math work, in a way most galas cannot manage, is that nearly every element of the evening is donated. The 45 restaurants and 80-plus wineries, breweries, and distilleries pour and serve at no cost. The Bay Club, which owns the Manhattan Country Club, hosts the event without charge — a contribution that has grown substantial enough that the Bay Club is now itself one of the Wine Auction’s lead sponsors. Corporate underwriters cover operational expenses. The cumulative effect is that every dollar raised at the Wine Auction — through ticket sales, bidding, and the night’s signature Paddle Raise — goes directly to MBEF. In recent years, that has meant roughly $1.3 to $1.4 million in a single night.
MBUSD has faced consecutive years of layoffs as state funding has increasingly lagged behind cost increases. This year is the most severe yet. In March, the Board of Education preliminarily authorized the reduction of up to 58.85 full-time positions. By May 6, after early retirements, MBEF class size reduction grants, and additional grants filled the gaps, the final reductions came down to 32.25 FTE — roughly 26 positions saved. MBEF was explicitly credited for pulling that number down.
It is in this context that MBEF will, this year, make its largest single grant in its 43-year history: $7.636 million to MBUSD for the 2026–27 school year. Mahan said the grant is likely to reach $8 million by the time the foundation’s extended annual appeal closes — a separate fundraising effort from the Wine Auction itself, but a parallel one. Both are the community rising to the occasion, again and again
The word collective is one of Mahan’s favorite descriptors for MBEF’s work.
“Everything that we do is a collective effort,” she said. “It’s a collective effort among a variety of stakeholders. But it’s also collective over generations.”
The continuation of a collective effort has been added to, year after year, for 32 years, by people who in most cases will never meet the children their gifts will eventually benefit.
“It’s a beautiful collaborative effort,” Weiss said, “that hopefully continues to get passed on from generation to generation.”
On Saturday, June 6, the village will gather. The tennis courts will be transformed. The light will be golden, the dress code will be Manhattan Beach, and fine wine will pour. There will be 2,500 people there, and approximately 10 times as many people whose contributions over three decades made the night possible.
For one night, the community will get to look at itself, all in one place.
It will be, in Weiss’s word, like champagne.
