Honors Program

About Rev. Williams: Rev. Williams is the minister at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco. From that position he has been on the forefront of change for more than 33 years as a community leader, activist, advocate, author, lecturer, and a national leader in the empowerment of the poor and marginalized. He has chaired three national conferences on issues of addiction, prevention, intervention, recovery, spirituality and the "extended family concept."

Rev. Williams is a graduate of the Perkins School of Theology–Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and hold multiple honorary doctorates from Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Southern Methodist University and several other institutions. Awards and honors bestowed upon him include the Distinguished Citizen's Award from the Mayor of San Francisco; the U.C. San Francisco Chancellor's Award and the NAACP National Humanitarian Award.

About Janice Mirikitani: Janice Mirikitani is the Executive Director of Programs at Glide Memorial Methodist Church/Urban Center and is the President of the Glide Foundation. She directs the non-profit, comprehensive human support services of Glide Memorial Methodist Church, including a free meals program that serves over one million meals a year.

She is an accomplished choreographer, poet and editor. Her published works include Shedding the Silence and We the Dangerous. Janice has been appointed to the Art Commission of San Francisco by Mayor Willie L. Brown.

Awards and honors bestowed upon her include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Book Awards, Woman of the Year as selected by State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Outstanding Leadership Award from the Japanese Community Youth Council and the Medal of Honor from the U.C. San Francisco.

About: Patricia Locke, a Hunkpapa Lakota and Chippewa of the Mississippi Bank, lives on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. She shares with her audience wisdom of the elders of the Indian tribes. Direct, yet gentle and persuasive, she talks about an alien and yet positive understanding about the earth and its people. She has spent her adult life helping others bridge the gap between two ways of life.

Lock's honors and accomplishments include having been a MacArthur Fellow; Executor of the International Native American Language Institute; Chair of the American Indian Advisory Committee for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission; and Former President of the National Indian Education Association.

As an educator, Locke has taught at UCLA, San Francisco Valley State College, Alaska Methodist University, Denver University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Southern Maine and is the author of many articles and publications.

About: David Popenoe is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers–the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. He serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School where he oversees the social and behavioral science departments.

Professor Popenoe specializes in the study of family and community life in modern societies, and is the author or editor of nine books. His most recent books are: Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society and Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America .

As a founder and co-chair of the Council on Families in America, a national nonpartisan group of scholars and family experts, he was primary author of the Council's 1995 report, Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation. He is a member of the professional advisory boards of the National Fatherhood Initiative and the National Parenting Association. He has previously been the Chairman of the Board of the American Institute of Family Relations, the nation's first family counseling and research organization, founded by his father in 1930.

Professor Popenoe has twice been awarded a Senior Fulbright Research Scholarship for research abroad and has been a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer in Greece, Israel and Spain. He hold the Masters and Doctor Philosophy degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

About: Stacey Kabat is the Founder and Executive Director of Battered Women Fighting Back! Inc., a community based human rights agency in Boston, Massachusetts. Mx. Kabat graduated from Bates College in 1985. While a student at the Women's Theological Center's Study/Action Program, she worked for two at a shelter for battered women in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Kabat was employed by Social Justice for Women, and worked at MCI-Framingham, the women's prison in Massachusetts. It was at MCI-Framingham that Kabat, along with a group of ten women who were incarcerated for defending their lives against their batterers, co-founded Battered Women Fighting Back!, Inc.

In 1992, Kabat became the recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award for her work in raising consciousness that under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, domestic violence is a human rights violation. She was the recipient in 1994 of an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in recognition of her work as co-producer and co-director of Defending Our Lives. As a granddaughter and daughter of battered women, Kabat has worked tirelessly to help victims of domestic violence.

About: Stephanie Coontz's most recent books, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families and The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, have placed her at the center of the family values debate. She has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in Washington, DC., and her work has been featured in many national publications and academic journals.

Coontz is currently a faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a former Woodrow Wilson fellow. She has also taught at Kobe University in Japan and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. She was selected to receive the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics in Fall, 1995. She won the Washington Governor's Writers Award in 1989 for The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families .

Her areas of research include U.S. Family History and Comparative Family History. She completed the Master of Arts program in European History at the University of Washington in 1970. Her B.A. degree was conferred by U.C. Berkeley in the American History Honors Program.

About: Fernando Torres-Gil is Associate Dean at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, as well as the Director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging.

Under the Clinton administration, Fernando Torres-Gil became the First Assistant Secretary for Aging in the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Torres-Gil is a national expert on public policy issues concerning health and long-term care, gerontology, ethnicity, human services, rehabilitation and disability. He has served in several governmental positions including staff director for the House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging, and a House Fellow serving Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

He was born and raised in Salinas, California, and is the son of migrant farm workers. He earned his B.A. in political science, graduating with honors from San Jose State University. Subsequently, he completed his M.S.W. and Ph.D. in social policy, planning and research from Brandeis University.