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On Thursday, February 6th, we are so proud to bring you The State of Female Justice: Los Angeles. Join us as we explore why women experience economic, racial, and cultural violence; and ask ourselves what might real justice look like for women in America?
WHAT: THE STATE OF FEMALE JUSTICE: Los Angeles
WHEN: Thursday, 6 February, Doors: 7:00pm, Program: 7:30pm
WHERE: UCLA Law School. Directions >
Meet the Women Behind The State of Female Justice: Los Angeles
We have an inspirational group of women who will take part in this discussion, here’s some brief information about each, make sure to check out their work!
LAURA FLANDERS (event host)
Best-selling author and broadcaster Laura Flanders is the founder and host of GRITtv, a multi-media platform for in-depth, solutions-focused interviews with the smartest thinkers & doers of our time. She is the 2013 local economies reporting fellow at Yes! and a contributing writer to The Nation magazine. Author of BUSHWOMEN; Tales of a Cynical Species and Blue Grit!… Flanders is a regular guest on MSNBC. Find out more at GRITtv.org or follow her @GRITlaura
SUSAN BURTON
Susan Burton founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project in 1998 after spending almost 20 years in and out of the criminal justice system. Since then, she has dedicated her life to helping other women break the cycle of incarceration, homelessness, addiction and despair. Susan has earned numerous awards and honors and is widely recognized as a leader in the women’s reentry movement. She is a past Soros Justice Fellow, a former Women’s Policy Institute Fellow, and former Community Fellow under the California Wellness Foundation’s Violence Prevention Initiative. She was previously a member of the state’s Little Hoover Commission and the Gender Responsive Strategies Task Force. Susan is also a co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON) and co-founder & national chair of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement (FICPM); both national grassroots civil rights movements comprised of formerly incarcerated individuals, their families and community allies. For her work, she was named a CNN Top Ten Hero for 2010. She was also awarded the prestigious Citizen Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In recognition of her insight and leadership, she was appointed by Los Angeles County Supervisor, Mark Ridley Thomas, to be a member of the Los Angeles County Sybil Brand Commission for Institutional Inspections. In this role she is able to inspect Los Angeles County correctional facilities and advocate for the health and well being of people housed in those facilities.
Most recently, Susan was named a 2012 recipient of the Encore Purpose Prize; a national honor given annually to five American social innovators for their contributions to society through their Encore careers.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her articles have appeared in theHarvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing audiences across the country as well as in Europe, India, Africa and South America.
Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution.
In 1996, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, which houses a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. In 2011, Crenshaw founded the Center for Intersectionality & Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, which aims to foster critical examination of how social structures and related identity categories such as gender, race, and class interact on multiple levels, resulting in social inequality. Crenshaw currently serves as Executive Director of both organizations.
EVE ENSLER
Eve Ensler is a Tony award winning playwright, performer and activist. She is the author of international phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues, which won an Obie and has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Eve wrote the New York Times Bestseller, I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World. She then adapted it as a play which ran successfully in South Africa, Paris, Berkeley and Off-Broadway. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over 100 million dollars for grassroots organizations around the world. On V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, it launched it’s most ambitious campaign One Billion Rising which inspired one billion people in 207 countries to Strike Dance and Rise on Feb 14, 2013 for the freedom, safety and equality of women. With the women of Congo, V-Day opened and supports City of Joy In Bukavu, Congo, a revolutionary center where survivors of gender violence Turn Their Pain to Power.
ASHLEY FRANKLIN
Ashley Franklin is an Organizer of the Community Rights Campaign, one of the primary mass campaigns of the Labor/Community Strategy Center working to put an end to punitive and exclusionary policies and practices that criminalize students and contribute to devastating graduation rates and education outcomes for students of color. She Co-leads the staff organizing team and Taking Action school club base-building program and helps lead the campaign’s policy work. Training students in organizing, campaign development, and political theory, she also leads the Taking Action Club at Manual Arts High School in South LA, which she organized in 2009 when she came on staff after graduating from the National School for Strategic Organizing. A graduate of Scripps College, she first got involved with the Strategy Center as a high school student in the Scripps College Academy, a program for first generation and low income students. She was then active in the Community Rights Campaign during college, helping research truancy policy in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
MAYOR GAYLE MCLAUGHLIN
As Mayor of Richmond, Gayle has led the City in a progressive direction that has kept City workers in jobs and City services in place, even in these hard economic times.
Mayor McLaughlin’s focus on environmental justice has led the city to move forward as a leader on many environmental initiatives. Her focus on a healthy environment has moved the city forward greatly with community gardens, bike paths, bay trail construction, and park renovations in neighborhoods throughout the city.
Thanks to her efforts advancing solar installation, Richmond was noted as leading the Bay Area for solar installed per capita in 2010. Richmond has also been given countless awards for its model green job training program that has graduated hundreds of Richmond residents who are now working in the green economy.
In 2007, Mayor McLaughlin joined other East Bay mayors and leaders in a widely heralded partnership for an East Bay Green Corridor for research and jobs for the new Green economy, and earlier this year, Lawrence Berkley National Lab agreed to build its 2nd campus in Richmond. Mayor McLaughlin has also worked with the community and City staff to make sure the City’s recently approved General Plan truly reflects the city’s new healthy, sustainable and equitable direction for its residents.
Gayle has advocated fair taxation from large corporations, including calling on Chevron (the largest corporation in the city) to fully pay its fair share. The City of Richmond is currently suing Chevron for damages from the massive 2012 fire at its Richmond refinery, and Mayor McLaughlin has called on Chevron to create a new corporate culture by putting the health and safety needs of Richmond residents before its profits.
As Mayor of Richmond, she has prioritized the interests of Richmond residents and families, advocating for residents evicted by bank speculators and approving policies to hold banks accountable. Currently, Mayor McLaughlin is proud to be leading Richmond in standing up to Wall Street and for her community with the Richmond CARES (Community Action to Restore Equity and Stability) program. This is a foreclosure prevention program that is seeking to acquire severely underwater mortgages in Richmond from the banks (either through voluntarily sales or through eminent domain) so the City can refinance the loans for the homeowners with reduced principals in line with current home values. Fixing the foreclosure crisis and restoring home equity will help the entire city of Richmond and the region by protecting the local economy, neighborhoods and home values.
Gayle also voted to assist Kennedy High School and other Richmond schools with $3 million, and she has been in the forefront of defending the civil rights of Richmond’s immigrant population. Her support for immigrant rights included a recently approved municipal ID for all Richmond residents, so everyone, including immigrant residents, can access services such as bank accounts.
Violent crime and property crimes have shown significant declining trends (homicides have decreased 66 percent from 47 in 2007 to 16 in 2013 – the lowest total in 33 years) during her tenure because of efforts in the City that Mayor McLaughlin has helped advance that have offered opportunities for returning parolees and intervention with at-risk youth.
Richmond is on the rise. Mayor McLaughlin’s focus on working side by side with a community that has suffered decades of injustices is helping to showcase how an urban community is transforming itself in the 21st Century.
OLIVIA WILDE
Olivia Wilde is one of the many actresses in Hollywood using her voice to shine light on important issues of injustice and inequality around the world. She has worked in the non profit world, on education projects in Haiti with the organization, Artists for Peace and Justice, for the last 8 years. She was one of the hosts of the PBS documentary series Half the Sky, based on the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, for which she traveled to Kenya to focus on financial empowerment for women through micro finance. Olivia founded the company Conscious Commerce, which acts as a creative agency, linking retail brands with non profits, to raise funds through everyday commerce. She worked on the Obama Campaigns, and continues to stay active in politics, recently joining Mayor de Blasio’s committee to support universal pre k for all New Yorkers. She has produced two short documentaries focusing on justice in Haiti, the second of which, Baseball in the Time of Cholera, made a huge impact on the investigation into the UN’s role in bringing the deadly cholera outbreak to Haiti after the devastating quake. As a part time journalist, she has written articles for Vogue, British Vogue, Huff Po, and Glamour magazine.
As an actress, Olivia, known globally for her role on HOUSE MD, has appeared in several big blockbusters and small indies alike, most recently in Spike Jonze’s Oscar nominated film, “her”.
She is thrilled to be a part of The State of Female Justice: Los Angeles.
