2017 Public Policy Forum in Women's History Month

 Community   Thu, March 16, 2017 07:24 PM

Washington, DC – Preparations are near complete for Dialogue on Diversity’s 2017 Public Policy Forum, to be held on March 23rd – as always, in Women’s History Month.  The venue is the District of Columbia’s Reeves Center at 2000 Fourteenth Street, N.W., in its newly designed Community Room.  Reviewing a range of Public Policy issues, Ma. Cristina Caballero, Dialogue President, stated, “a series of panels, targeting especially the Latino communities of the District of Columbia, take up key problems in U.S. and world society and economic life, each from the special viewpoint of women in their struggles for parity in education, occupational status, and income earning activities, child and family care, and, for the case of many migrants, the interest in acceptance and security in an alien cultural climate.” 

 

Principal speaker for the Forum’s midday session is Mari Carmen Aponte, who served as a historically effective Ambassador to El Salvador, and who held as well the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.  She views the coming encounters between the evolving U.S. foreign policy ethos and the fragile civic structures in much of Latin America, and their striving for economic advances. .

 

The 2017 Forum is being presented in partnership with the Global Policy Institute, whose President, Paolo von Schirach, will lead off the Forum segment on immigration. Among other contributors to the immigration discourse will be David Bier of the Cato Institute, whose series of recent blog posts have meticulously “deconstructed” the rationales employed by the Administration in its attempted bans on travel to the U.S. by a range of near-and middle-eastern nationals.  Andrea Cristina Mercado, heading the We Belong Together campaign, has decried the accelerating U.S. detention and deportation practice.  Lilia Alvarez, heading legal services at Carecen, a District of Columbia organization now focused on aiding immigrants in fear of deportation, conveys the sense of alarm verging on despair that she sees in the faces of a steady flow of migrant persons and families that come through the Carecen offices.

 

In a morning session on education, Julie Anderson, Senior Researcher with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, describes the effect of women’s carefully nurtured skills in the economic world, while Roberta Rincon, among other presenters, zeroes in on the effects of STEM studies as women breach the barriers to get a foothold in the tech industries.  Dr. Maria E. Rosa, Dean and Professor of Nursing and Health Sciences at the Antillean Adventist University at Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, concludes the panel.  

 

The all-important cluster of concerns over the economic lot of women is analyzed by four experts, representing activist organizations,  a think tank, and finally the District of Columbia Director of Local and Small Business Development, Ana Recio Harvey.  Carol Joyner and Joi O. Chaney detail the unending daily efforts to better the condition of women and their working families and to secure a realistic equal pay régime throughout the economy. Sagrario Ortiz, resourceful publicist and organizer of immigrant Latina entrepreneurs, speaks of her growing and many-dimensioned work.  

 

The most far reaching of the themes that drive the 2017 Forum is the question of women’s condition legally and socially in cultures and polities around the world,  beginning with the U.S.,  with its signal achievements and still lagging labors to complete the job.   Here the questions of domestic violence as a scar on societies everywhere, comes to the fore. Danieh Shuaib discusses the many-front struggle, across national borders, to avert domestic violence and repair its harms,  and Kristina Gilchrist of the consulting group Living Your Life on Purpose, and Patricia Aliya Khan, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, review the distinct facets of women’s life and opportunities here and abroad.  

 

Agenda

 

  • 10:00am -- WELCOME:  MA. CRISTINA CABALLERO, President/CEO, Dialogue on Diversity, Convenor
    PAOLO VON SCHIRACH, President, Global Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.
    JACQUELINE REYES, Director, Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs
  • 10:15am -- OVERVIEW–THE POLICY LANDSCAPE: 
    ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON,  U.S. House of Representatives
  • 10:45am -- EDUCATION:  Pre-K, STEM studies – Women’s Under-Representation in Tech Professions,   Mid-Career Training and Re-Training,   Cost-Free College
    JULIE ANDERSON, Senior Research Associate, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
    LISA RANSOM,  Senior Policy Advisor,  National Alliance of Partnerships in Equity
    ROBERTA RINCON, Ph.D. Manager of Research, Women and Girls in Education,Society of Women Engineers
    MARIA E. ROSA, Ph.D, Dean and Professor, Nursing and Health Sciences,  Antillean Adventist University,  Mayagüez, Puerto Rico
  • 12:15pm -- MIDDAY/LUNCH SESSION - KEYNOTE SPEAKER SPECIAL TOPICS:
    MARI CARMEN APONTE, former Ambassador to El Salvador and Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Department of State
  • 1:30pm -- THE ECONOMIC ROLES OF WOMEN: Discrimination, the Gender Wage Gap and other Barriers to Women’s Day in the Sun, current research and analysis
    ANA RECIO HARVEY, Director, Department of Small and Local Business Development, District of Columbia Government
    MARIA BURGOS, Supervisor of Global Learning, Prince William County, Virginia
    CAROL JOYNER,  National Political Director,  Labor Project for Working Families
    JOI O. CHANEY,  Executive Director,  Equal Pay, A Project of the Tides Center
  • 2:15pm -- CONDITION OF WOMEN AROUND THE WORLD: Health Care,    Trafficking, Custody, Inheritance Rights
    DANIEH SHUAIB  of Global Policy Institute,   Project on Domestic Violence
    KRISTINA GILCHRIST,  Living Your Life on Purpose consulting group
    PATRICIA ALIYA KHAN  Policy Associate, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
  • 3:10pm -- IMMIGRATION:  The Economics –  the Politics –  the Human Story
    PAOLO VON SCHIRACH, President, Global Policy Institute
    DAVID BIER, Immigration Policy Analyst, Cato Institute
    LILIA ALVAREZ, Esq.  CARECEN,  Director, Legal Services, Latino Resource and Justice Center
    ANDREA CRISTINA MERCADO,  Chair, We Belong Campaign,  Children Deported
  • 4:00pm -- Adjournment

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