Webinar: The Battles for Women’s Equality and Women’s Rights
Webinar Details:
This upcoming Women’s Equality Day event comes at an extremely important time for defending women’s reproductive rights, voting rights and many others.
Join us, learn from experience and gain strength and guidance for the battles ahead. We welcome your active involvement.
Date: August 20, 2022
Time: 11 am PDT / 2 am EDT
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Shirley Weber, California Secretary of State
Moderator: Bertha Gaffney Gorman, journalist, President & CEO at Life Expansion & Education Project
Panelists:
- Camila Chávez, Executive Director, the Dolores Huerta Foundation
- Ting Ting Cheng, Civil rights attorney and activist
- Janice Mathis, Esq., Executive Director National Council of Negro Women
- Eleanor Smeal, President & Co-founder Feminist Majority Foundation
- Julie C. Suk, Professor and author of We the Women: the Unstoppable Mothers of the ERA
After the panel discussion there will be a Q & A session.
There will be a series of brief videos from young people on the importance of the vote for equality and rights during the program.
We will also have a call to action, presented by former Mayor of Sacramento Heather Fargo, in honor of the Silent Sentinels to hold signs that says on VOTE within our communities at a special event on October 8, 2022.
Tickets: $12
Registration required.
Moderator:
Bertha Gaffney Gorman’s professional career spanned more than 50 years in the public, non-profit, and private sectors as a reporter, a consultant with the California State Assembly, two decades in Corporate America, a Governor’s Appointee, and as legislative advocate for the California State NAACP.
Since her retirement in 2005, she has made 10 trips to Mombasa, Kenya to work in distressed communities, and currently serves on the Board of Fortune Schools and the Sacramento Chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. She is the mother of two sons and proud grandmother of four amazing grandchildren.
Keynote Speaker:
Shirley Nash Weber, Ph.D., was nominated to serve as California Secretary of State by Governor Gavin Newsom on December 22, 2020 and sworn into office on January 29, 2021. She is California’s first Black Secretary of State and only the fifth African American to serve as a state constitutional officer in California’s 170-year history.
Before her appointment, Secretary Weber served four terms as an Assembly Member representing California’s 79th Assembly District, which includes parts of the City of San Diego as well as several cities and communities in the San Diego region. Weber also served as a member and chair of the San Diego Unified School District and has twice served as a California Elector, including chairing the California College of Presidential Electors on December 14, 2020. Before her election to the Assembly, she retired from the Department of Africana Studies at San Diego State University after 40 years as a faculty member and serving several terms as department chair.
Panelists:
Camila Chávez, Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF).
Ms. Chávez oversees the strategic direction of DHF that seeks to empower historically disenfranchised communities. They provide the training and skills to make transformational changes in their communities. She has led the evolution of this organization from the infancy seeded with a $100,000 from the Puffin/Nation prize for Creative Citizenship awarded to Dolores Huerta. This has resulted in an organization with a $5 Million dollar operating budget and over 40 full time staff members and 100 seasonal canvassers.
Under Chávez’s leadership the Dolores Huerta Foundation has increased political representation of communities of color; addressed voting and education inequities; and secured millions of dollars for neighborhood improvements such as sidewalks, gutters, street lights, neighborhood parks, swimming pools and school campus renovations.
The James Irvine Foundation named Camila Chávez as one of its 2022 Leadership Award recipients. The Award comes with a grant to continue the Dolores Huerta Foundation’s work of strengthening underrepresented communities by training and inspiring the next generation of leaders.
Ting Ting Cheng, Civil rights attorney and activist.
Before joining the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, she litigated gender discrimination cases at Legal Momentum, the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Earlier, she was an attorney at the New York City Commission for Human Rights and a public defender and immigrant defense attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services.
Ting Ting was the Legal Director of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington and served on the National Organizing Committee. She clerked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa for Justices Albie Sachs and Edwin Cameron. In addition, Ting Ting was a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa where she received the Amy Biehl Award.
As a youth she was a concert oboist and performed with orchestras in the United States, including the American Symphony Orchestra. She is a graduate of the City University of New York School of Law and Bard College.
Janice L. Mathis, Esq., Executive Director of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).
Ms. Mathis is responsible for NCNW’s programming, communications, membership, philanthropy, legal affairs and special events. Membership in NCNW’s 330 local sections (chapters) increased 14% during 2021. Together with its 32 national affiliates, the NCNW family now encompasses more than two million persons. During the past two years, NCNW’s employee base and annual budget have increased 100%.
Janice has expanded NCNW’s program and social justice agenda with unique offerings such as Clean Water for Flint, Adulting 101, Millennial Entrepreneurs, Emotional Health is Wealth, Kids Against COVID, STEAMStart Hungry for Education HBCU College Tour, Women’s Economic Empowerment, the Red Card Campaign (to end violence and discrimination against women and girls), IDEAS (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility Symposium), and Good Health WINs (Women’s Immunization Networks).
Prior to joining NCNW, Janice was General Counsel and Vice President of Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Citizenship Education Fund (CEF), where she led civil rights and diversity efforts such as the Keep the Vote Alive campaign in 2005 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. She implemented an effective shareholder education program resulting in new employment, contracting and board seat opportunities with Fortune 500 companies. She sat on diversity councils for both Georgia Power and The Coca-Cola Company.
For nearly two decades, Janice practiced law in Athens, GA, in a firm she started with several law school classmates.
Eleanor Smeal, President and Cofounder of the Feminist Majority.
As an activist, grassroots organizer, lobbyist and political analyst she continues to be a major leader of the modern-day American feminist movement. She is currently president and a cofounder of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The Feminist Majority Foundation, founded in 1987, is a non-profit organization headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia, whose stated mission is to advance non-violence and women’s power, equality, and economic development.
Ms Smeal has served as president of the National Organization for Women for three terms. She has appeared frequently on television on shows such as Good Morning America,The Today Show, Nightline, etc. She has also appeared frequently on radio and testified before Congress. Smeal has organized numerous events around and given speeches on the concepts of feminism, equality, and human rights as they pertain to people in and outside of the United States. In 2015, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
A longtime supporter of the ERA (the Equal Rights Amendment) She has campaigned for its passage since the 1970s. In January 2022, she led a rally outside of Lafayette Square in front of the White House exactly two years after Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Amendment in January 2020.
Today Eleanor Smeal continues to lobby for the ratification of the ERA and is one of the most prominent activists for its passage.
Julie C. Suk, Author and Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law
Julie Suk is an expert on gender and constitutional law in the United States and around the world. She is the author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, the first book to chronicle and assess the twenty-first century revival of the ERA, and dozens of scholarly articles about antidiscrimination law, inequalities faced by women because of pregnancy and motherhood, and constitutional reform. Her next book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It, will be published in Spring 2023.
Sponsors:
We would like to thank these sponsors for their generous donations making this webinar possible.
- Julia Burrows, Consultant, Funkhouser & Associates
- Dr. Aaron Centric
- Julie Chapman
- Doris Jeanette Foster Foundation
- Leslie Palmer
- Patricia Pierce
- Thomas Rankin
- William N. Reed, Secretary-Treasurer, United Domestic Workers
- Lynne Roberts
- Kim Salter, Ph.D.
- Jackie Smith, Reality One Group Complete
- Martha Wheelock