Barriers & Opportunities

Leslye E. Orloff is vice president and director of Legal Momentum's Immigrant Women Program. She joined Legal Momentum's Washington, D.C. office in September 1999 to found and direct the Immigrant Women Program (IWP) which advocates for laws, policies and practices that enhance the legal rights of immigrant women and immigrant victims of violence against women. IWP focuses on improved access to immigration benefits, the justice system, public benefits, social services and health care.

Location

Ruth B. Mandel is Board of Governors Professor of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Since 1995, she has been Director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, the unit of Rutgers University that explores state and national politics and government through research and education and links the study of politics with its day-to-day practice.

From 1971 through 1994, Mandel developed and directed Eagleton's Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), where she remains affiliated as a Senior Scholar. Mandel teaches and writes about leadership, with emphasis on U.S. women's political history, women as political candidates and officeholders, women's political networks, and the "gender gap." She is the author of numerous publications about women's changing political roles.
 

Location

Debbie Walsh is the director of the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics. She joined the CAWP staff in 1981 after earning her B.A. in political science from SUNY Binghamton and her M.A. in political science from Rutgers, where she was an Eagleton Fellow.

She has organized more than a dozen national conferences for women officials, ranging from small meetings focused on issues such as women’s legislative caucuses, women in legislative leadership and training programs for newly elected women legislators to CAWP’s quadrennial national Forum for Women State Legislators, to which every woman state legislator in the country is invited. 

Location

Avis Jones-DeWeever, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the National Council of Negro Women. She served previously as NCNW's Director of the Research, Public Policy, and Information Center for African American Women. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, where she was formerly the Director of Poverty, Education, and Social Justice Programs. Her work examines the causes and consequences of poverty on the well-being of low-income women and families while identifying effective programmatic strategies that result in poverty reduction.

Location

Joan Entmacher is Vice President and Director of Family Economic Security at the National Women's Law Center, where she focuses on policies affecting the economic security of low-income women and their families, including Social Security, child support, tax, and income support programs. To promote improvements in these policies, Ms. Entmacher has testified to Congress on several occasions, frequently has advocated before administrative agencies, has participated in litigation, and has written and spoken extensively on these issues. Before joining the Center in 1998, Ms. Entmacher served as Director of Legal and Public Policy for the National Partnership for Women and Families, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College, Chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, and attorney in the U.S. Department of Labor Solicitor's Office. Ms. Entmacher is a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School.

Location

Silvia Henriquez is responsible for the overall management, fundraising and administration of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. Silvia has positioned NLIRH as one of the leading organizations working to advance the reproductive health and rights of Latinas. Within the first two years of her tenure, she increased national visibility through the 2004 March for Women’s Lives and the National Latina Summit. Subsequently under her leadership, NLIRH has developed a successful organizing and leadership development training curriculum, a national policy agenda and built coalitions with state and national partners that advance a reproductive justice advocacy effort. Through her work at NLIRH, Silvia has published articles in “Social Policy, Organizing for Social and Economic Justice and Democratic Participation” and “Conscience, The Newsjournal of Catholic Opinion.”

Location

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is the 15th President of Bennett College for Women. Recognized for her progressive and insightful observations, she is also an economist, author, and commentator, and has been described by Dr. Cornel West as “the most iconoclastic public intellectual in the country.” Dr. Malveaux’s contributions to the public dialogue on issues such as race, culture, gender, and their economic impacts, are shaping public opinion in 21st century America. A committed activist and civic leader, Dr. Malveaux serves on the boards of the Economic Policy Institute, The Recreation Wish List Committee of Washington, DC, and the Liberian Education Trust. She is the Founder/President/CEO of Last Word Productions, Inc. a multimedia production company headquartered in Washington, DC. Dr. Malveaux received her BA and MA degrees in economics from Boston College, and earned a Ph.D in economics from MIT.

Location

Carol Hardy-Fanta is Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston's John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Brandeis University's Heller School, an MSW from Smith College, and a B.A. from Occidental College. Dr. Hardy-Fanta is author of three books: Latina Politics, Latino Politics: Gender, Culture, and Political Participation in Boston (Temple University Press, 1993), Latino Politics in Massachusetts: Struggles, Strategies and Prospects (Routledge Press, 2002), and Intersectionality and Politics: Recent Research on Gender, Race, and Political Representation in the United States (Haworth Press, 2006) . She is a nationally recognized scholar on Latina/o politics and has published widely on the intersection of gender, race and ethnicity in politics and public policy.

Location