Zachary Norris to Keynote 30th Anniversary Gala: Reconnect
- Impact Fund celebrates impact litigation as driver of social justice
- Honors Center for Food Safety and Lawyers for Civil Rights
Zachary Norris
Berkeley, 04.20.22 – The Impact Fund is delighted to announce that Zachary Norris will be the special guest and keynote speaker at its 30h Anniversary Gala on May 10.
Impact Fund Executive Director, Jocelyn Larkin, said: “We are delighted to welcome our community to "Reconnect" - we will celebrate together and honor leaders in the fight for civil rights and environmental justice.”
Norris serves as the Soros Equality Fellow at Open Society Foundations. He is currently writing a book and creating other materials examining and offering solutions to the root causes and impact of family separation within communities of color. Prior to that he served as the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and authored the book Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment. Defund Fear has been praised by Forbes, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews.
Norris is the co-founder of Restore Oakland, a community advocacy and training center empowering Bay Area community members to transform local economic and justice systems. He is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end youth incarceration. He helped build California’s first statewide network for families of incarcerated youth. It led to the closing of five youth prisons in the state, legislation being passed enabling families to stay in contact with their loved ones, and the defeat of Prop 6—an ineffective criminal justice ballot measure.
Zachary cares deeply about the social justice challenges the Impact Fund addresses and says: “The Impact Fund is supporting and leading incredible work to protect the planet and our democracy. You all are working to create a world that is safe, just, and inclusive and I am honored to join you and to speak to both in-person and virtual attendees."
This year, the Gala—a highlight in the annual calendar of Bay Area legal community fundraisers—returns to being in-person for the first time since 2019. The event will take place on Tuesday, May 10 on the top floor of the Westin St. Francis, Union Square, San Francisco, famed for its floor to ceiling panoramic vistas of San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Joining Zachary Norris will be two of the Impact Fund’s grantees, which the Impact Fund is grateful to acknowledge for their recent successes in court.
“While COVID-19 prevented us from meeting in person for three years, we didn’t press the pause button on social justice,” says Larkin, continuing: “recent history has shown how vital our courts are in protecting the lives of communities, particularly communities of color. That’s why we are honored to recognize two of our grantees for holding the powerful to account.”
The first to be honored is Center for Food Safety for its work in Kupale Ookala v. Big Island Dairy, a clean water and environmental justice case challenging the unlawful discharge of animal waste from an industrial dairy farm in Hawaii. The litigation resulted in a victorious settlement and Court approval of a Consent Decree that closed the facility. Big Island Dairy agreed to cease all dairy operations at the facility, wind down its affairs, and dissolve itself as an entity.
"One of the main missions of Center for Food Safety is to halt the environmental harms of industrial agriculture operations like the Big Island Dairy, harms that are most often felt by communities of color. With the help of the Impact Fund grant, the Center for Food Safety was able to advocate on behalf of the Ookala community and put an end to the mega dairy’s unlawful dumping of animal wastes into local waterways,” said Sylvia Wu, Managing Attorney of Center for Food Safety’s Hawaii and California Offices.
The second of the honorees is Lawyers for Civil Rights for its work in Huot v. City of Lowell, a voting rights case against the City of Lowell, Massachusetts, which successfully challenged the at-large electoral system for electing members to the City Council & School Committee for impermissibly diluting the vote of Asian-American and Latino residents. Implementation of a consent decree is now actively underway to change the city's electoral system to a more fair and equitable one.
"The Impact Fund grant was instrumental in our voting rights victory on behalf of Asian-American and Latino voters in Lowell, Massachusetts. The grant allowed us to retain an expert early on, which helped pave the way to success. And the real-world impact of the lawsuit has been dramatic: in the first elections under the City's new, more fair electoral system, over one-third of those elected were people of color -- up from zero when we filed suit," said Oren Sellstrom, Litigation Director of Lawyers for Civil Rights.
Reflecting an uptick in optimism as the United States hopes for a return to relative normalcy and a new administration sets its priorities, the theme for the Gala this year is “Reconnect.”
“We’re looking forward to some face-to-face social interaction and to hugging our friends again,” continued Larkin, concluding: “it’s to reconnect, with each other and with the values we share. Equity, and respect are not just words, they are actions. We look forward to celebrating recent victories, but also to reconnecting and recommitting to the eternal struggle for justice. ”
Tickets are available at: https://ifgala22tix.eventbrite.com. Sponsors of the event include the Kazan McClain Partners’ Foundation, Gibbs Law Group, Girard Sharp, Lichten & Liss-Riordan, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, Miller Shah, and Sanford Heisler Sharp. To sponsor the event click here: https://www.impactfund.org/gala/ifgala22spon.
ENDS
For more information and photography, contact:
Teddy Basham-Witherington 415.845.1206 / twitherington@impactfund.org
About The Impact Fund
The Impact Fund was founded in December 1992 to help advance economic, environmental, racial, and social justice through the courts. Originally envisioned as a purely grantmaking organization, the Impact Fund has made 737 grants totaling $8,368,291. Click here for Grant Criteria and information about Grant Deadlines.
Since its inception, the Impact Fund has grown to include both advocacy and education in its range of services. Today, the Impact Fund litigates a small number of cases directly, authors amicus briefs, provides a substantial amount of pro-bono consulting, and presents an annual conference for plaintiff-side class action practitioners, a training institute for budding public interest class action practitioners, and numerous seminars and webinars. Click here for the 2021 Annual Report.
About the Center for Food Safety
For twenty years, CFS has been at the forefront of organizing a powerful food movement that is fighting the industrial model and promoting organic, ecological, and sustainable alternatives. https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org
About Lawyers for Civil Rights
Lawyers for Civil Rights fosters equal opportunity and fights discrimination on behalf of people of color and immigrants. LCR engages in creative and courageous legal action, education, and advocacy in collaboration with law firms and community partners. LCR focuses on impact areas that represent the front lines in today’s battle for equality and justice. LCR is headquartered in Boston and represent clients across Massachusetts and surrounding communities The impact of LCR’s life-changing work ripples across the country. http://lawyersforcivilrights.org