Scott McVarish is an attorney and community organizer. He worked for the California Teachers Association (CTA), the largest union in California, and its affiliate chapters for 10 years, retiring in 2008. Previous to CTA, Scott was the Executive Director of the Model Neighborhood Program, a community organizing group with funding from Kaiser Permanente’s Good Neighbor Program.

As a staff attorney for CTA, Scott represented local chapters in unfair labor cases and individual teachers in employment discrimination cases. Highlights included his completion of negotiations for the first-ever collective bargaining agreement for the Rosedale Teachers Association and protecting the rights of gay teachers in cases featured on Dateline NBC including the Dr. Jim Merrick case. Scott specialized in negotiating win-win settlements between the teacher union chapters and their respective school districts that saved taxpayers and union members hundreds of thousands of dollars. Scott also extensively trained teachers regarding their legal rights in a sought-after training entitled Teachers & the Law. Scott also ran the college-outreach campaign for the No on Prop 38 Campaign, hiring, training and supervising eight field organizers.

As the executive director for local CTA affiliates, Scott organized his chapters into politically powerful forces that dominated local school board and even city council elections, winning CTA’s highest political awards on numerous occasions. Scott managed the political campaigns of 14 school board and city council candidates, winning 12 of the races against well-entrenched incumbents. These campaigns varied from $20,000 to $400,000 in expenditures and mobilized unprecedented numbers of teacher volunteers. Scott used innovative community organizing strategies based on asset mapping, community coalitions, advanced geo-coding of voters and Saul Alinsky organizing tactics. In his internal organizing, Scott blended strong advocacy for his members with high-profile public accountability campaigns for local school district officials.

Scott graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in International Communications (through the College of Honors Program), and then later earned a joint- J.D., and M.A. from the UCLA School of Law and School of Public Policy respectively. In law school, Scott’s honors included winning the Equal Justice America Fellowship and was named UCLA’s first-ever LeBeauf Scholar and Student of the Year. Scott studied one year at El Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano in San Jose, Costa Rica and remains fluent in Spanish. At the age of 20, Scott wrote the book The Greening of New Zealand, published by Random House, detailing strategies of local environmental, labor and community groups in New Zealand where he lived for two years.
Scott currently resides in Venice Beach.