Program Description
Event Details
As a part of the 2021 Coronado Community Read, we invite you to join us for a moderated panel discussion on addressing racism in communities and how we move forward in an inclusive fashion. Please register here to receive the zoom link for this event.
Panelists
Genévieve Jones-Wright, Community Advocates for Just and Moral Governance (MoGo)
Shawn McClondon, Sister Cities Project
Supervisor Nora Vargas, San Diego County Board of Supervisors
Dr. David Miller, University of San Diego
Moderator
Dr. Carl Luna, Institute for Civil Civic Engagement
Genévieve Jones-Wright
Geneviéve Jones-Wright was raised by her single mother in a low-income home in Southeast San Diego where devotion to family and self-respect was cultivated.
In keeping with her goal of “carrying the bags” of Justice Thurgood Marshall, Geneviéve earned a B.A. in mass media communications from the University of San Francisco, a J.D. from Howard Law, and an LL.M. in Trial Advocacy specializing in federal criminal defense from California Western School of Law. She proudly served San Diego County as a public defender from 2006-2019, and now serves as the founding Executive Director of Community Advocates for Just and Moral Governance (MoGo) — an impact litigation organization that works to hold Government accountable to all people, especially those who have been disenfranchised.
Geneviéve is the founder of Motivation.In.Action, a board member of the David’s Harp Foundation, and a volunteer attorney for the California Innocence Project. She is also the President of the Earl B. Gilliam Bar Association.
Shawn McClondon
Shawn McClondon is the founder of the Sister Cities Project. This program partners underserved minority communities with affluent, white communities to build a new relationship to deepen cultural understanding. The larger vision for Sister Cities Project is to create a model that can be duplicated throughout the United States and the world eventually. They believe that forming these partnerships between differing communities will be the catalyst to help end racial inequality.
Shawn has been working towards equality and equity for many years. In 2014, Shawn founded non-profit Youth Campaigns, a hands-on work experience program that creates a pipeline toward careers in digital marketing for low income, minority and at-risk youth ages 16 -24 in the Greater San Diego area. He is currently a part of the leadership of Solana Beach 4 Equality, a group pushing for greater diversity and racial equity in Solana Beach and beyond and the main support system for the Sister Cities Project. In addition to his equity work, Shawn has been a featured speaker on digital marketing strategy and work with some of the biggest brands in the world including WD40, Dexcom and Bumble Bee Tuna. Currently, he runs a digital marketing consulting company.
From 2016 to 2018 he served on the Board of Directors for the Friends of the Solana Beach Library and was an ambassador for the Chamber of Commerce. In the past few years, he has run community programs at the Solana Beach Library. Those programs included Skin in the Game, a discussion about race relations in America, Finding Voices, a monthly town hall meeting discussing the growing issue of teen anxiety and depression and Youth Campaigns, a digital marketing training program for High School seniors in the area interested in a career in technology.
Dr. David Miller
David Miller received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2007. His research focus is the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States.
David has been with USD since 2005, offering a range of upper and lower-division courses including The Civil War and Reconstruction, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Popular Culture, US Immigration History, California History, A History of Race and San Diego, US History to 1877, and Race and Ethnicity in the American Experience. Miller received the 2017 Faculty Award for Exceptional Teaching, the 2019 Center for Educational Excellence "Best Attendance" award, and in 2020 the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture travel grant to explore the history of immigration in San Francisco and New York City from a Catholic perspective. He is the History Department's internship program coordinator.
David also serves as the co-editor of The Journal of San Diego History, a joint venture with the San Diego History Center, and can be found on any given day out and about exploring our city.
Supervisor Nora Vargas
On November 3, 2020, Supervisor Nora Vargas was elected to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, representing District 1. Supervisor Vargas was sworn in on January 4, 2021, and elected Vice-Chairwoman of the Board.
Supervisor Vargas’ priorities include mitigating the impacts of the pandemic and focusing on economic recovery, while ensuring equity and inclusivity.
Prior to her election to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Vargas was as en elected member and President of the Southwestern College Governing Board, the only public institution of higher education within San Diego’s South County. Supervisor Vargas served on the Board of Southwestern since her appointment in 2013 and was elected twice to the position.
Supervisor Vargas also served as the Vice President of Community and Government Relations at Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, where she worked to increase access to safe, quality healthcare, and education for women and families across California.
In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown appointed her to serve on the 12-member California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) making her the first Latina to be appointed in the board's history. In that capacity, Supervisor Vargas was charged with securing the financial future of California's educators, providing retirement, disability and survivor benefits for California’s educators and their families. CalSTRS is the largest educator-only pension fund in the world and the second largest pension fund in the United States.
For the last 25 years, Supervisor Vargas has worked to drive positive change and serve her community through public service. She is committed to ensuring that marginalized voices are included in the public dialogue regarding important issues such as health access, energy, technology, consumer protection, the environment, civic engagement, pensions and education.
Supervisor Vargas is proud to serve the more than 630,000 residents of District 1 which encompasses the incorporated cities of Coronado, Imperial, Beach, Chula Vista, National City and communities within the City of San Diego, including Barrio Logan, Chollas View, Grant Hill, La Playa, Lincoln Park, Logan Heights, Memorial, Mount Hope, Mountain View, Nestor, Otay, Palm City, Point Loma, San Ysidro, Shelltown, Sherman Heights, Southcrest, Stockton, Sunset Cliffs and part of Downtown San Diego. The district also includes the unincorporated communities of Bonita, Sunny-side, Lincoln Acres and East Otay Mesa.
Dr. Carl Luna
Carl Luna is a full professor of political science in San Diego Mesa College’s Accelerated College Program, a unique program providing college courses to advanced high school students on the campuses of the San Diego Unified School district. Joining the department in 1989, he has also served as department chair, chair of Mesa College’s Chairs’ committee and president of the academic senate. Dr. Luna has served as a visiting professor at USD since 1999. In 1999-2000 he was a senior Fulbright Scholar lecturing on international relations and economics at Nizhny Novgorod State University in the Russian Federation. In 2014 Association of Community College Trustees recognized him as one of the 5 top community college professors in the country.
Dr. Luna is also a frequent commentator on politics, giving hundreds of interviews to local, national and international media including public radio and TV, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press and the BBC and is San Diego Fox5’s resident political analyst. He has written and blogged extensively for the San Diego Union Tribune and San Diego City Beat Magazine and is a contributing author to the anthology of presidential biographies, Public Pillars, Private Lives and a revised volume on the presidency: Imperial Presidents: The Rise of Executive Power from Roosevelt to Obama. He also wrote Motherland, a novel of Russian political intrigue.
Dr. Luna is co-chair of Restoring Respect, a community initiative promoting greater civility in San Diego dialogue supported by a consortium of academic institutions and community groups. In 2014 he became the first director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement, formed between USD, Mesa College, Miramar College and San Diego City College. As a minor footnote to history, a brief written by Dr. Luna formed the closing argument presented to the United States Senate by Presidential Counsel Greg Craig in the impeachment trial of President William Jefferson Clinton.