Exciting #uniTy Update!

Every gift made now through midnight tonight in support of our uniTy crowdfunding campaign will be MATCHED UP TO $25,000 TOTAL by a longtime, generous donor of the Williams Institute! That means your gift goes TWICE AS FAR in support of our lgbT community!

So please make a gift to the right and help the UCLA Williams Institute's research in support of our trans community! #uniTy2016  ---->

Tonight we are excited to honor Laverne Cox and Shannon Minter

About The Event

Tonight, The Edison in Downtown Los Angeles will open its doors for the uniTy event. All tickets previously purchased will include entrance to the event, open bar, and appetizers. Celebrity DJ's Casey Alva and Daisy will be spinning all night, and there will be performances by the Trans Chorus of LA, The Edison Aerialists, and The Edison Tap Dancers. 

Our Crowdfunding Goal

Raise $60,000 to be able to add trans inclusive questions to the California Health Interview Survey, one of the nation's largest standardized health-related data surveys.

Why CHIS is Important

Data has been critical to every policy debate impacting LGBT people, from marriage and family law to military policy and immigration. However, very little data is available about the U.S. transgender population, and no federal population-based surveys identify transgender respondents. Adding trans related questions to CHIS to be able to accurately measure the trans population would be a huge leap forward in the fight for lgbT equality.

Where Your Donation Goes

The Williams Institute is now poised to greatly expand the knowledge base about transgender people and to build a persuasive scientific basis for including gender identity questions on large population-based surveys. The CHIS Project described below will provide us with the best data to date about the transgender population and help overcome objections to adding gender identity to federal, state, and other large surveys.  By helping to secure gender identity questions on federal and state surveys, the return on this investment in these projects will be exponential.

• California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) is one of the largest population-based health surveys in the U.S., collecting health and well-being data information every two years on about 50,000 respondents. Adding a gender identity question to CHIS will provide an extremely valuable data set, and provide the much-needed real world experience to add this question to other government (state and federal) population-based surveys.  

Give Now to Make an Impact

Thanks to the generous contribution from The Edison, 100% of all donations and event sponsorships from this event will go toward our current transgender research projects and ongoing data and policy analyses. 

Your contribution will help ensure the necessary funding of existing transgender projects and allow our scholars to analyze, publish, and disseminate our findings to key stakeholders, including federal, state, and local policy makers, state and federal courts, federal agencies, state non-government groups, the media, and the public.

To find out how your company can support these efforts, please contact Hamid Jahangard, director of development, at Jahangard@law.ucla.edu or at 310-794-5192.

See you tonight at the Edison!!

How The Williams Institute Impacts Public Policy

The Williams Institute used its research and legal expertise to make real change for transgender people by:

• Serving as the main research support for two Presidential Executive Orders that prohibited gender identity discrimination against employees of the federal government and against federal contractors – protecting over 1/4 of the U.S. workforce.
• Providing the research and legislative support to make California the first state to ban the trans panic defense – an outdated criminal defense that said violence against transgender people was “reasonable.”
• Publishing a study showing that transition-related health care services offered by employers have a huge impact on individual lives, but at a minimal cost to employers.
• Training judges in over 30 states on the legal needs of transgender people.
• Conducting a survey of 1,200 sexual orientation and gender identity minorities in Nepal, the first survey of its kind in South Asia, to help the Nepalese government count Third Gender people on its national census.

Thank You to Our Host Committee!

Co-Chairs Barbara Jacobs & Jeff Ganter

Weston Milliken, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, Sean Connolly

LA Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, LA Councilmember Paul Koretz , Weho Councilmember John Duran, Palm Springs City Council Geoff Kors, LA City Controller Ron Galperin, LA Councilmember Paul Krekorian, Weho Councilmember John Heilman, LA Councilmember Nury Martinez, LA Councilmember Jose Huizar, LA Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell

Jim Andre, Hal Bastian, Blair Beston, Brondi Borer, Roberta Conroy, Vincent Cummings, Masen Davis, Nanette Gartrell, Jeffrey Haber, Laurie Hasencamp, Jody Herman, Vincent Jones, Paul Kellog, Abbe Land, James Lunsford, Mike Lurey, Jessica Wethington Mclean, Michaela Mendelsohn, Tom Morgan, Dee Mosbacher, Anil Patel, Ashlee Marie Preston, Sandra Richards, Jeff Richter, Chuck Williams, Mia Yamamoto, Rabbi Barbara Zacky, and Rick Zbur

Thank you to our CHIS Campaign Partners!