Lateefah Simon (born January 29, 1977 in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

) currently serves as President of Meadow Fund. Previously President o
Akonadi Foundation
and an advocate for civil rights, racial justice, and juvenile justice. In 2003, she became the youngest woman to receive a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to ...

, for her leadership of the Center for Young Women's Development (now the Young Women's Freedom Center) from age 19. Under the then San Francisco district attorney and Vice President of the United States

Kamala Harris Kamala Devi Harris ( ; born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th vice president of the United States. She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well ...

, Simon led the creation of San Francisco's Re-Entry Division with Back on Track, an advocacy program for young adults charged with low-level felony drug sales. Simon has been the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the program director of the Rosenberg Foundation. In 2016, Simon was appointed to the

California State University The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univers ...

Board of Trustees by Governor

Jerry Brown Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Secretary of S ...

. Simon was elected to represent the seventh district on the

Bay Area Rapid Transit District The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or BART, is a special-purpose district body that governs the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco. The system itself also serves no ...

board of directors in 2016. Her motivations for running included her reliance on

BART Bart is a masculine given name, usually a diminutive of Bartholomew, sometimes of Barton, Bartolomeo, etc. Bart is a Dutch and Ashkenazi Jewish surname, and derives from the name ''Bartholomäus'', a German form of the biblical name ''Barthol ...

, as someone who is legally blind and unable to drive. For the year 2020, she was elected President of BART's board of directors. Simon earned an MPA from USF, a BA in public policy at

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

and was a 2014 Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Fellow at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where she was the 2017 Commencement speaker. She is the mother of two children and has written about the difference in how she was treated as an unwed mother and as a widowed mother. Simon's late husband, Kevin Weston, was a recognized journalist and activist who died from leukemia in 2014.

Awards

* 2003

MacArthur Fellows Program The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...

* 2007 Jefferson Award * 2005 "California Woman of the Year" by the California State Assembly *2010 (New Frontier Award) https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/new-frontier-award/award-recipients/lateefah-simon-2010 *2016 Emerge America, Emerging Political Leader Award https://emergeamerica.org/bart-board-candidate-lateefah-simon-to-receive-political-emerging-leader-award/ *2018 (Girls Leadership) https://girlsleadership.org/blog/honoree-lateefah-simon/

References

External links

"An Interview with Lateefah Simon"
''CYD Journal'', Sarah Raskin

''Independent Lens'', PBS

''San Francisco State University'', 2010 {{DEFAULTSORT:Simon, Lateefah 1977 births Activists from the San Francisco Bay Area American blind people Living people MacArthur Fellows Mills College alumni People from San Francisco