How Ken and Terry Yagura Built A Legacy of Giving

The Yaguras have given a great deal — hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising efforts, countless volunteer hours, even their family home. But their story began with a microwave.

After moving to North Lake Tahoe, Terry saw the teachers at her son’s school had no way to warm their lunches, so she and Ken hauled in their brand new microwave.

“The microwaves back then were so heavy. Ken had to help me carry it,” Terry remembers.

She kept spotting needs and filling them: art lessons taught classroom to classroom, a walk-a-thon that raised $30,000 a year for playground equipment.

“One kid ran the entire ten miles,” Terry remembers fondly.

Ken’s giving reaches back to his childhood in Boyle Heights, where a Boys Club had been his refuge.

Decades later, he’d build one of his own. Invited to a talk about a new Boys & Girls Club, he figured he’d have a donut and leave. Instead, somewhere between the coffee and the door, he wrote a check for $5,000 and folded it in half.

“I didn’t want them to know it was me,” he says.

That “$5,000 donut fiasco” pulled him in as the club’s fourth co-founder. He went on to chair the committee and raise the money to build the club, determined to fill it with real role models.

“They weren’t just random people brought off the street,” he says. “They were sheriffs, firefighters, and pillars of the community.”

When the campaign needed proof its founders believed in it, the Yaguras sold their home and donated half the proceeds.

“We were always on the same page,” they say.

What stays with them is the ripples. When a young musician needed a saxophone for college, they handed over a $2,000 instrument for $15. She became an accomplished orchestra conductor. Years after they helped build the youth club, a girl from the once-feared Kings Beach neighborhood won a full scholarship to Pomona College.

Ken and Terry rarely set out to change a single life. They just kept seeing needs and filling them, one microwave, one saxophone, and one folded check at a time.