V-Day Welcomes Kimberlé Crenshaw & Wendy Schmidt to the V-Board

V-Day is so proud to announce the addition of two extraordinary women, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Wendy Schmidt to our V-Board, a group that provides vision, leadership, and wisdom to help guide and support V-Day in its work. They join current V-Board members Carole Black, Jennifer Buffett, Rosario Dawson, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, Mellody Hobson, Katherine McFate, Pat Mitchell, Thandie Newton, Emily Scott Pottruck, Amy Rao, Cari Ross, Sheryl Sandberg, Lisa Schejola Akin, Regina Kulik Scully, Susan Celia Swan, Charlize Theron, and Kerry Washington.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, has been a part of the V-Day movement for over ten years including performing her original monologue "Respect" at V-Day Harlem in 2002, taking part in the premiere of the V-Day documentary Until The Violence Stops at Sundance in 2004, participating in two marquee events at the Until The Violence Stops: NYC festival in 2006, leading a discussion on "Intersectionality and the New Orleans Experience" at SUPERLOVE at the Superdome as part of V-Day's ten year anniversary celebration V TO THE TENTH in 2008, and participating in The State of Female America and The State of Female Justice panel discussions in 2012 and 2013 as part of One Billion Rising.

Kimberlé is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. Crenshaw coined two groundbreaking frames - Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality - that have influenced scholarship and policy pertaining to discrimination and the challenge of inclusion across multiple disciplines and social contexts. A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on Intersectionality has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution.

In 1996, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, which houses a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. In 2011, Crenshaw founded the Center for Intersectionality & Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, which aims to foster critical examination of how social structures and related identity categories such as gender, race, and class interact on multiple levels, resulting in social inequality.

Wendy Schmidt is the President of The Schmidt Family Foundation, where she works to advance the development of renewable energy and the wiser use of natural resources. The foundation houses its grant-making operation in The 11th Hour Project, which supports more than 150 nonprofit organizations in program areas including climate and energy, ecological agriculture, human rights, and our maritime connection.

The 11th Hour Project is currently partnering with V-Day to create the V-World Farm, a sustainable farm based on 338 hectares of arable land located near the village of Nyanghezi, about 30 km South of Bukavu, approximately 20 km South of the City of Joy.

Wendy has been a supporter within the V-Day movement for many years and has traveled to Bukavu, DRC to visit and support City of Joy and the V-World Farm. In July 2013, Wendy was a featured speaker at "CITY OF JOY: The Story of Women Turning Pain to Power to Planting," a panel discussion at The Paley Center for Media where she joined V-Day Congo Director/Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler Deschryver, Eve Ensler, and V-Board Members Pat Mitchell, Thandie Newton, and Amy Rao.

In 2009, Wendy and her husband Eric Schmidt, created the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), and in 2012 launched the research vessel, Falkor, as a mobile platform to advance ocean exploration, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans. Furthering her commitment to ocean health issues, Wendy partnered with XPRIZE to sponsor the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE, following the Deep Horizon disaster, as well as the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a prize that will respond to the global need for better information about the process of ocean acidification, one of the harbingers of climate change.