Contact: Michael Green
Associate Director, Justice and Society Program
The Aspen Institute
202-736-2539 | michael.green@aspeninstitute.org
$400,000 Endowment Established at Justice and Society Program from The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation
Washington, DC, April 15, 2013 – The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation has granted an endowment of $400,000 to the Aspen Institute’s Justice and Society Program to establish the new Halle Scholarship program. This scholarship will bring two emerging leaders to Justice and Society’s classic summer seminar in Aspen, CO. The scholars will be chosen from academic or non-governmental organizations focusing on family law, domestic violence and sex trafficking prevention, and the delivery of vital services to women, children, and families in need.
The new Halle Scholar program will provide a unique opportunity for its two annual recipients to step back from the intense demands of advocating for the most vulnerable Americans, allowing them return to consider the principles that first motivated their service. It will allow them to network with others engaged in public interest law, as well as with the seminar’s non-attorney participants, all in the comfortable mountain retreat that the Institute’s Aspen setting affords.
The inaugural Halle Scholars are Honorable Ruth McGregor, who in 2009 retired as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Arizona, and Malika Saada Saar, Director of the Human Rights Project for Girls (Rights4Girls), a new effort focused on the human rights of vulnerable girls in the US.
“We feel fortunate that our first Halle Scholars so exemplify the work that the Halle Family supports through its philanthropy,” said Meryl Chertoff, Director of the Justice and Society Program. “The Scholarship program will enrich the conversation about justice, by bringing in voices that speak for those who often are voiceless, and will add a new dimension, in particular, to our discussion of Gender and Justice”
For more than three decades the Justice and Society Program summer seminar has brought together individuals from diverse backgrounds to discuss what we mean by justice and how a just society ought to deal with longstanding philosophical disputes and contemporary social challenges. Co-founded by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the mid-1970s, the seminar’s roundtable discussions are led by two distinguished and experienced moderators: a judge and an academic. Recent participants in the seminar have included individuals as diverse as the pioneering female Chief Justice of Lagos State, Nigeria, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rabbis, ministers, philosophers, physicians and psychotherapists.
Diane Halle explained the reason that the Foundation has chosen to direct its philanthropy to this new Scholarship program:
“Domestic violence, although it has been going on from the start of mankind, is one of the front and foremost issues of the 21st century. We at The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation are excited that the Aspen Institute will be helping us with our endeavor to bring this issue to the forefront.”
The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, DC. Its mission is to foster leadership based on enduring values and to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues. The Institute is based in Washington, DC; Aspen, Colorado; and on the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It also has offices in New York City and an international network of partners. For more information, visit www.aspeninstitute.org.
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