2009-2010 BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Rachel Jensen,  Helen Zeldes, Kate Kowalewski, Jen Lai, Audra Bergman, Julia Yoo, Noor Kazmi.

Rachel L. Jensen, President

Rachel co-founded the Girls Think Tank in October 2006 and currently serves as President and Board Member. Rachel is an attorney and partner in the law firm of Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, based in San Diego, California. At the firm, she prosecutes nationwide class actions against insurance companies and other large corporate actors.

Rachel received her undergraduate degree in International Affairs from Florida State University. As a college student, Rachel founded a collegiate chapter of the National Organization for Women and revamped the previously dormant Women’s Educational & Cultural Center, serving as the Center’s student director and board member for two years. She also served as a student senator in the student government association. In her senior year, Rachel interned in Governor Chiles’ office to work on immigration and domestic violence issues.

Rachel received her law degree from Georgetown University Law School in 2000. During law school, she served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the First Annual Review of Gender and Sexuality Law, a publication of The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. She also taught Street Law at a public high school in Washington, D.C. After graduating from law school, Rachel joined the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, before clerking for Judge Ferguson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She later spent a year abroad clerking for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, and the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in The Hague, Netherlands.

In October 2007, Rachel helped organize a three-day World Conference on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery held at UCLA. She has assisted on a number of human rights cases and presented on her experiences at the ICTR, including a panel presentation on The Security of Africa with co-panelists John Prendergast, Karin Ryan, Bobby Bailey (Invisible Children), and Daniel Akech James (one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys”), at the Bishop’s School in Spring 2007.

Rachel believes passionately in human rights and the right to be treated with dignity no matter one’s life circumstances. Please contact Rachel at girlsthinktank@gmail.com if you would like to get involved in our homeless outreach and advocacy program.

Kate Kowalewski, Treasurer

Helen Zeldes, Fundraising/Public Relations

Helen Zeldes is an activist armed with a law degree, a businesswoman and social entrepreneur who long ago realized the efficacy of people to people exchange, supporting indigenous artisans, weaving human rights & the environment in to business with a passion. Ms. Zeldes takes on corporations by day as a class action lawyer at Zeldes & Haeggquist, LLP, owns a local artisans gallery (engaging in fair trade for more than 20 years) and works to further the rights of women by night. Helen is a proud supporter of GTT because she believes in, “Microactivism. The hands-on kind. At the end of the day, we have created a hundred winter survival backpacks for our homeless neighbors and hand them out. Whether in San Diego or Sudan, women coming together over the dinner table make a difference. Our success story is not grandiose but every day, common and growing. Aren’t we not a world of micro-communities, banded together through empowerment of each other, a collective voice breaking through the silence? What a better world we will be.” Helen believes GTT provides a much needed forum for people to turn ideas in to action, find support and make a difference. Helen has spent far too many years in school (in California and Hawaii), her favorite job is raising a wily almost five year old, dreams of the day when all women will enjoy equal rights and freedoms and believes that giving back is not an option but a civic duty.

Jennifer Lai, Secretary

Jennifer is a former labor and community organizer who is now an attorney and associate at Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP in San Diego where she litigates complex class actions for plaintiffs. Jennifer graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelors of Arts degree with honors in History and Political Science. After college, she organized unions for four years. In 2003, she graduated from UCLA School of Law where she served as a law clerk for the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Advocates and the Tribal Council of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians. She also worked extensively with students as a teaching assistant for “Asian Americans and the Law,” a course offered by the UCLA Asian American Studies Program, and as a member of Students of Color Against the Resegregation of Education (SCARE), amicus curiae in Grutter v. Bollinger.

After law school, Jennifer joined Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Diego. In January 2005, eight months prior to Hurricane Katrina, she moved to New Orleans at the invitation of long-time civil rights organizers affiliated with SNCC to launch a grassroots campaign to establish a federal constitutional guarantee to quality public school education. After Katrina, this campaign shifted to providing immediate relief to survivors and newly arrived reconstruction workers as well as legal and organizing support in the formation of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, People’s Organizing Committee, New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, and other grassroots-based organizations across the Gulf South. Jennifer worked to sustain the work of these organizations as a staff attorney based out of New Orleans for the Advancement Project and the National Immigration Law Center. She returned to San Diego in January 2007.

Audra Bergman, Membership

Audra joined Girls Think Tank in 2008 after hearing about GTT’s Winter Survival Backpack project. She’d been looking for a way to help the homeless community and was impressed with the effort and success of the Girls.

Audra is a Louisiana native and moved to San Diego in 2006 from New Orleans. She is the Director of Executive Education Network (EEN), a company that she started in 1998. EEN partners with U.S. universities and provides continuing education courses in the Caribbean and the U.S. EEN hires expert consultants and university faculty, who fly to the Caribbean to teach business people who live there. Courses are offered as open enrollment or on-site for organizations, and some include Project Management, Lean Six Sigma, Supply Chain Management, and High Performance Leadership. EEN has trained thousands of professionals in five Caribbean countries.

Audra graduated with a B.S. from University of Miami with a double major in Advertising and Psychology, and a minor in Marketing. She completed further coursework at University of New Orleans in Entrepreneurship and Business Administration.

In San Diego, she has also served as a Big Pal (youth mentor) and in the Friendly Visitor program (for isolated seniors) through Jewish Family Service. Her interests in GTT include helping to create solutions for homeless people, as well as helping seniors in the community.

Julia Yoo, Development

Upon graduation from law school in 1998, Julia Yoo founded the Law Center for Women Prisoners, a nonprofit organization designed to assist incarcerated women. The Law Center, in partnership with externship programs through the University of Colorado law school, provided legal assistance to hundreds of incarcerated women for a variety of issues from prisons’ failure to provide adequate medical care to termination of parental rights.

In 2000, Julia began litigating on behalf of incarcerated people for violation of their Constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment. She has filed suits against private and public prisons for failure to provide appropriate and timely medical care and for sexual assault committed by prison staff. She has represented eight incarcerated women in the state of Colorado alone, all of whom prevailed in their lawsuits, their settlements totaling over $1,000,000.00.

In 2003, Julia joined Gene Iredale and began litigating on behalf of people whose Constitutional rights have been violated by wrongful arrest or the use of excessive force, as well as wrongful death. Julia has given lectures and presentations on the rights of incarcerated people, most recently in 2008 at the National Lawyers’ Guild conference in Detroit, and to various law enforcement and legal organizations. She has also guest lectured at Metropolitan State College in Denver, Colorado.

In the past nine years, Julia has been actively involved in nonprofit and charitable activities outside the practice of law. She has sat on numerous Boards of Directors of various educational and criminal justice organizations. She has served on the Board of Directors of Rescu Academy, a school for at-risk children; Wellesley College San Diego Club, where she served as Alumnae Admission Representative; and Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, where she remains on the advisory board.

Noor Kazmi