Madison Civics Club -- About Our 2008-2009 Speakers

One of the most inspiring leaders of his generation and one of the country's leading voices for children, Jonah Edelman is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stand for Children, a groundbreaking child-advocacy organization that harnesses citizen commitment to affect electoral and political decisions to benefit children.

Edelman was born and raised in Washington, DC. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1992, and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he earned a Ph.D. in politics. In 1996, at age 25, Edelman Helped organize the Stand for Children rally in Washington, D.C. More than 300,000 people attended this pioneering event, making it the largest demonstration in support of children in US history. Drawing inspiration from past social movements and effective membership organizations that represent environmentalists, seniors, women, and others, Edelman set out to create a politically influential grassroots constituency for children.

Stand for Children now has 5,000 members and 20 local chapters. Since 1999, Stand for Children members have won 88 state and local victories, achieving a number of important education reforms and leveraging more than $1.7 billion in public funding for programs that are improving the lives of more than 2.7 million children.

In 2005 Edelman was given the Prime Mover Award by the Hunt Alternatives Fund. In his inspirational presentation, he teaches advocacy skills to those who work with at-risk populations. By pioneering innovative strategies for advocacy, he galvanizes the next generation to stand for children.

In November 1998, Tammy Baldwin was elected to Congress -- the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives from Wisconsin. She was re-elected to her fifth term in 2006.

In the 110th Congress, Tammy serves on the Committee on Energy and Commerce and its subcommittees on Health; Energy and Air Quality; and the Environment and Hazardous Materials and the Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism Homeland Security. She is a leading advocate for universal health care and a proponent of energy independence and renewable fuels. Tammy is also a forceful supporter of civil rights and an advocate for those in our society whose voices, too often, are not heard.

Tammy’s driving motivation in politics is to pass legislation that will guarantee health care for all in America. A pragmatist, she has brought together conservative as well as progressive thinkers to craft the Health Partnership for Creative Federalism Act (H.R. 506) to meet this goal, legislation that creates state/federal partnerships toward that end.

Tammy Baldwin was born in February 1962 in the area she now represents in Congress and traces one branch of her family tree back to 1866 in Sauk County (Baraboo). Raised in Madison jointly by her mother and maternal grandparents, Tammy graduated first in her class of 510 students at Madison West High School in 1980. She received an A.B. degree from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1984 with majors in government and mathematics. In 1989, while an active member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors, Tammy earned her J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and practiced law from 1989-1992. She served three terms as a State Representative for the 78th Assembly District (comprising central and south Madison) from January 1993 to January 1999.

Azadeh Moaveni is Tehran correspondent for Time Magazine. One of the few American newspaper correspondents permitted to work continuously in Iran since 1999, Moaveni has reported extensively on youth culture and the student movement in the Islamic Republic. She is the author of Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. A review in the Washington Post, praised her as having " a journalist's eye for struggle and a memoirist's knack for finding meaning in her own internal conflicts."

Moaveni, who grew up in San Jose, studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, won a Fulbright fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arab at the American University in Cairo. She began her writing career in 2000, when she joined TIME Magazine as a Tehran- and then New York-based reporter, covering society and political stories across the Middle East. She also worked for The Los Angeles Times, covering the Iraq War, before returning to TIME. Moaveni writes about Arab and Iranian youth culture, Islam, Iran's reform struggle, and Middle East politics, with a special emphasis on demographics and young people's attitudes toward the West.

Jorja Leap is a member of the faculty of the UCLA Department of Social Welfare and an expert on international crisis intervention and trauma response. Although in the past she has worked in Bosnia and Kosovo, at Ground Zero, and in New Orleans, she has more recently turned her attention to gang violence and youth development. Dr. Leap lends her expertise widely in Los Angeles, counseling the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Mental Health, the Mayor's Criminal Justice Office, the LA Unified School District, and the LA Police Department.

Dr. Leap currently serves as the policy advisor on gangs and youth violence to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and she is part of a team selected by the City Council Ad Hoc Committee on Gangs to recommend policy and program changes in gang prevention and intervention. Her approach focuses on prevention, with an emphasis on school involvement.

Dr. Leap was born and raised in Los Angeles. She completed her B.A. in Sociology, her Masters of Social Work, and her Ph.D. in Psychological Anthropology, all at UCLA. After three years on the faculty of the University of Southern California School of Social Work, she moved to the UCLA faculty. Dr. Leap is married to LAPD Deputy Chief Mark Leap.

Here is a link to the article about Dr. Leap that brought her to our attention as a speaker.

An award-winning blogger and often-quoted expert on American tweens, teens and early twentysomethings, Anastasia Goodstein is the author of a new book about teens and technology called Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online. As the founder of Ypulse, an independent blog for teen/youth media and marketing professionals, providing news, commentary and resources on commercial teen media for teens, she reaches a highly influential audience of agency, brand, and media executives as well as social marketers trying to reach youth. The blog has been featured in several leading publications including USA Today, BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fast Company .

Ms. Goodstein offers an inside guide to what teens are really doing on the Internet and with technology. Opening up a window into their hyperconnected digital world, she provides fresh insight into blogging, social networking, cyber-bullying, and other topics that help parents, as well as the rest of the world, find a way to understand and connect to their kids and to navigate this new social medium.

*Note -- Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who was originally scheduled for this date
has been forced to cancel his appearance