Public Interest
Jun. 25, 2002
Staying Focused
Marjorie Sims spent the past year making the legal services community aware of her presence, talking with them about the California Women's Law Center, which works to protect and advocate the civil rights of women and girls.
Since assuming the executive director position of California Women's Law Center one year ago, Marjorie Sims has had little time for a personal life, including finding a permanent place to live.
"I don't even have a bed," Sims says. "I've got a little couch that I sleep on, and it's just because I've been working a lot."
When she moved in June 2001 from Washington, D.C., Sims rented an efficiency apartment above a friend's garage in Culver City. She considered the arrangement temporary, fully intending to move to a place of her own within a couple of months.
With her hectic schedule at the law center, however, a couple of months turned into a year. She just found the time several weeks ago to sign a lease for an apartment in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Village Greens, just 20 minutes from her job in the Wilshire District. She moves in soon.
"Most people would say that I'm a workaholic," Sims says. "I did say when I first started working at the law center that I would spend a year just focused on the law center."
True to her word, Sims, 45, spent the past year making the Los Angeles legal services community aware of her presence, talking with them about the law center, which works to protect and advocate the civil rights of women and girls, and about her passion, women's economic security.
In talking with a broad cross section of the community, Sims has identified the issues that the California Women's Law Center should address in the upcoming years. She and her staff of 10 have created the first five-year plan for the center, outlining those issues. In her free time, she started a support group for women executive directors of other nonprofit organizations, where they can share their challenges and ideas.
It's little wonder it took her so long to find a place to live.
'Big Shoes to Fill'
Sims' initial challenge was to fill the shoes of Abby Leibman, who ran the law center since she founded it with Sheila Kuehl and Jennifer McKenna in 1989. When the three started the center out of Leibman's Santa Monica apartment, it was the only statewide organization focused on protecting and advocating the civil rights of women and girls.
It didn't take the center long to make an impact. In 1990, it partnered with Los Angeles' Public Counsel, a nonprofit law firm where Leibman worked as an attorney before starting the center, to establish the Child Care Zoning Project. This project amended zoning ordinances to comply with state law and the child-care needs of communities throughout Southern California.
In 1994, the California Women's Law Center and the Fund for a Feminist Majority formed a Women's Advisory Council to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners to address what the center saw as the police's indifference to crimes of violence against women as well as gender bias within the department. The council helped increase the hiring goals of the department for women to 43 percent.
The prevention of domestic violence was a priority for Leibman, whose sister, Nina Leibman Donney, was beaten, stabbed and killed by Nina's husband in 1995.
The law center released a groundbreaking study in 2000, "Murder at Home: A Case Study of the Violent Deaths of Women." The study examined 50 cases of women killed by their husband or partner. It revealed that these cases often were treated by the authorities as family-law matters, instead of a criminal matters, which often led to lesser sentences for the accused murderers.
Last year, Leibman stepped down as executive director because she believed it was time for the law center to transition into new leadership.
"It's important for founders to move on and have a new vision," says Leibman, who continues to do consulting work with McKenna. "[Sims] has a remarkable vision for the law center."
Kuehl, who is a Democratic state senator for Santa Monica, admits that the law center specifically chose a replacement for Leibman who would continue to address issues that always have been vital to the center, like domestic violence. Sims has been that person, according to Kuehl.
"I've been very pleased with Marjorie's work," says Kuehl, who likes how Sims identifies with the issues.
Initially, Sims was wary of following in the path of Leibman, a respected and much-beloved figure in the Los Angeles public interest community. But, to her surprise, she received lots of support from people inside and outside the law center.
"I knew that I would have big shoes to fill, but what has been really overwhelming is how welcoming people have been over the past year," Sims says. "It's been incredible."
'Getting Out There'
Sims came to the law center from Washington, D.C., where she worked as a policy analyst and legislative assistant for nine years at various nonprofit organizations, including the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues and the International Center for Research on Women.
In 1995, she co-founded Women's Policy Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides policy research, analysis and information to lawmakers and the public on legislation that affects women and children. Sims served as executive director for four years.
While some raised eyebrows when the law center hired Sims because she isn't a lawyer, her time in Washington, D.C., has proved invaluable.
"Her experience in public policy research, analysis and advocacy provides the organization with a terrific foundation to lead the organization through its next phase of development and growth," says Angela Oh, former member of the law center's board, who encouraged Sims to apply for the position.
"Her vision, dedication and ability to work with diverse constituencies are at the core of her skill set, and she is a woman who simply will not surrender in the face of challenge. The women's community needs Marjorie Sims among its leaders today," Oh says.
Sims' interest in women's issues dates back to her childhood in Las Vegas. With three sisters and four brothers, she realized early on that her parents had a real clear view of what boys should do and what girls should. For instance, her brothers did the yard work, while Sims and her sisters did the housework.
During high school, Sims worked for a doctor who ran an abortion clinic twice a week. Sims was responsible for cleaning the instruments after the abortion was performed. Sims was exposed to women of all ages who were in difficult situations and who felt that the government should not play any role in their decision.
"I'll never forget some of their faces," Sims says.
Sims came to the California Women's Law Center because it is a statewide organization working on a number of issues, including women's reproductive health. Sims, who received her master's degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills, always wanted to return to California to work as an advocate.
Before jumping into the daily tasks of the law center, she wanted to understand its mission and meet the center's board and supporters as well as the local public interest community.
"So a lot of what I spent many of the early months doing is just getting out there," Sims says. "Letting people know that I'm here and that I welcome their ideas and their thoughts."
One of the organizations that Sims got to know right away was Public Counsel, which has a long history with the center. Since those early days when Leibman founded the California Women's Law Center, the two organizations have teamed on many projects, according to Daniel Grunfeld, president and chief executive officer of Public Counsel.
Currently, the two organizations are helping pregnant teens build a stable future for themselves and their children, including drafting policies for local high schools to ensure that the girls get the education they need.
"Marjorie is terrific," Grunfeld says. "She has, in a short time, established herself as someone who's passionate about the issues and the law center."
And what Sims is really passionate about is women's economic security. When she headed to Washington, D.C., in 1992, she wanted to become a women's reproductive health advocate because of her earlier work at the clinic. Unfortunately, there were no positions available, and instead she worked on other women's issues - and it was then that she realized how important economic security is to women.
"[A woman's] outcome is really dependent on her economic status," Sims says.
Her work at organizations like the International Center for Research on Women fueled her passion for economic security.
Sims speaks with everyone about this issue, trying to create dialogues among colleagues, constituents and the public.
"Women's economic security underlies every single aspect in a woman's life, whether it be her health, employment or violence that she might face," Sims says.
In February, Sims and the California Women's Law Center hosted a policy forum with Ann Crittenden, former New York Times economic reporter and author of "The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued." The group talked about the role of mothers and how the importance of the work done in the home isn't talked about at the national level. This type of forum opens the possibilities of greater dialogues, according to Sims.
"People see that the law center is interested in this issue, people call and have ideas and want to establish partnerships," Sims says.
One such organization that contacted Sims was the Women's Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that funds groups that serve low-income women and girls. Sims assisted the foundation on its May 22 report of women's economic status in California. Among other things, the report found that a woman living in Los Angeles or San Francisco with one child must earn $16.38 an hour to be self-sufficient, while minimum wage is only $6.75.
Sims advised the foundation on the shape and direction of the report. She highlighted areas that the report should focus on, such as education and employment.
She also commented on the recommendations in the report, which was given to lawmakers. The recommendations included passing living-wage legislation in California, increasing funding so that Title IX, which prohibits the discrimination on the basis of sex in schools, is fully implemented and creating a refundable state Earned Income Credit, which is a tax credit given to low-income people with children.
'Habeas Project'
Keeping in the tradition of the law center, Sims continues to address violence against women.
The California Women's Law Center, the USC Post-Conviction Project and the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison teamed in March to launch the Habeas Project.
In 2001, state legislation, Penal Code Section 1473 et. seq., was enacted, allowing battered women and survivors of domestic violence who were incarcerated before 1992 of spousal murder to apply for writ of habeas corpus, seeking release from prison. This gives these women a chance to present evidence of the abuse that they suffered.
Law center staff attorney LeAnna Gutierrez and USC Post-Conviction Project assisted state Sen. Betty Karnette, D-Long Beach, during the writing of the legislation. After it was enacted, Gutierrez expressed interest in working on a case in which she would assist a woman in prison file for a habeas writ. Sims saw this as an opportunity for the law center to get involved and use its resources to help these women.
"It allows us to talk about the law, specifically about women-in-prison issues, and ... our role as a legal services support organization. What we're doing is finding volunteer lawyers who will help women with their advocation," Sims says.
The law center is matching volunteer attorneys with female prisoners who need help filing habeas writs. It is also talking to its many supporters about the new law to raise awareness of the dramatic increase of women in prison and why many of them are of color.
The law center's board of directors recently approved race and gender as one of its six issues to focus on during the next five years, according to Sims. The other issues are sex discrimination, women's health, violence against women, economic security and exploitation of women.
The staff examined the status of the economy, California's demographic and economic tendencies and world events to determine the most important issues.
A new area that the California Women's Law Center will focus on in the upcoming year is how race and gender intersect.
"Really looking at how there are serious differences among women, dependent on race and class, and how do we as a really strong voice in the women's community and in the legal services community continue to highlight that and advocate for the elimination of racial disparity, wherever they may exist," Sims says.
Sims stresses that the work of the law center always has been about all women, despite their race or class. And she has taken her message to other women's organizations.
Sims meets women executive directors once a month for lunch to discuss their challenges and opportunities. They include Latonya Slack of California's Black Women's Health Project, Patricia Murar of Los Angeles Women's Foundation and Eve Hill of the Western Law Center for Disability Rights - and the list keeps growing, according to Sims.
"It's fun to know that so many women want to connect," Sims says.
Hill finds the meetings very helpful and says that she finds the gathering unique in the nonprofit world, which is often competitive.
Indeed, there is only so much money to go around to these needy organizations. In all that Sims accomplished this year, fund raising didn't make the list.
"It's been really hard to raise money for the law center," Sims says. "A lot of people gave significant amounts of their normal contributions to the rebuilding and relief efforts in New York, and so people just don't have the money that they normally had."
While the law center's operating budget is a little more than $1 million annually, only $700,000 in donations came in this past year. The center is cutting back on unnecessary costs, like mailing publications not absolutely critical to its work, according to Sims.
"We've not spent money that we didn't have," she says.
To combat this problem, the center's board of directors created the President's Council, which comprises all former presidents of the law center. The council focuses on long-term fund raising.
"That's been really encouraging that people that have been associated with the law center want to continue that and oftentimes want to step up in support of the law center," Sims says.
She's hopeful that getting out into the community, including holding house parties in which supporters of the law center invite their friends to learn about the center and ask them for donations, will reap financial rewards.
Except for the lackluster fund-raising campaign, Sims is pleased with her first year as executive director.
"I think that I have really big expectations of myself and the people that work here and the community at large, and I feel that a lot of those expectations have been met," Sims says. "I'm still kind of amazed that I have this opportunity."
Stefanie Knapp
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