2024-2025 Founders Lecture

LaShawn R. Jefferson
Friday, April 11, 2025 | 5 p.m. | Messenger Recital Hall

"The Unifying Force Of Human Rights: Our Path Forward Together"

LaShawn R. Jefferson is a Fellow at Yale Law School and the former Senior Executive Director of Perry World House, a global policy center at the University of Pennsylvania. She has over two decades of experience in legal and policy advocacy, strategic planning and programming, women’s international human rights, civil-society organizations, and philanthropy. At the Ford Foundation, she worked to advance women’s human rights globally and in the U.S. through field building and investments in the areas of rights advocacy; policy advancement; strategic communications and engagement; intersectional leadership and analysis; women-of-color leadership; research; and capacity building. She held several leadership positions at Human Rights Watch, where she directed their women’s rights research and advocacy work, providing strategic and intellectual leadership, crafting and executing long-term advocacy strategies, managing staff across seven regional or thematic foci, attracting and leveraging resources to achieve human rights goals, and representing HRW at the highest levels of national, regional, and international fora. She is the author or editor of dozens of human rights reports on a variety of issues confronting women around the world and has written op-eds and articles that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The International Herald Tribune. She received a BA from Connecticut College and an MA in International Relations and Latin American Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS.