Aileen C. Hernández

Aileen C. Hernández is an urban consultant. Through her firm Aileen C. Hernández Associates, established in 1967, she has worked with major American companies, governmental agencies, educational institutions, foundations, and community groups in the areas of human relations, equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, management skills, organizational development, meeting facilitation, transportation planning, fair housing, program evaluation, public relations and events planning.

Employment/Experience

Appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in May 1965 as the only woman member of the first United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ms. Hernández resigned in November 1966 to return to California where she established her consulting firm. Prior to her appointment to the EEOC after the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Ms. Hernández was Assistant Chief of the California Division of Fair Employment Practices from November 1962 through May 1965. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she left for California in 1950 to work for the Pacific Coast Region of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. During her eleven years with the Union, she served first as an organizer and later as the West Coast Region's Education and Public Relations Director. She was also a newspaper columnist in Washington, DC, a Research Assistant in the Department of Government at Howard University and has taught courses at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

Education/Training

Ms. Hernández has a Bachelor's Degree, magna cum laude, in Sociology and Political Science from Howard University (1947), and a Master's Degree in Government, with highest honors, from California State University at Los Angeles (1961). She has done additional graduate work in public administration at the University of Oslo, Norway and at New York University and in adult and nursery school education at UCLA and the University of Southern California. In 1979, she was awarded an HonOSP-RAry DoctOSP-RAte in Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College. She was 1993 Regents Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara and 1993 Tish Sommers Lecturer at the Institute for Health and Aging of the University of California, San Francisco.

Foreign Travel

Ms. Hernández has traveled extensively throughout the United States and the world and appears often on television, radio and the lecture platform. In 1960, as an American specialist in labor education, she toured six Latin

American countries for the U.S. Department of State--lecturing in English and Spanish on American trade unions, minorities in the United States, the U.S. political system and the status of American women. In 1975, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, in cooperation with the U.S. State Department, sponsored her involvement in an international conference in Bonn, Germany on Minorities and the Metropolis. She toured the People's Republic of China in March 1978 with an American women's rights group and in 2000 as part of a conference exploring areas of cooperation between women in the United States and China. As a member of a foundation-funded national Commission, she traveled in South Africa and its neighboring countries to gather information for a major study on that region. The report of the Commission, South Africa: Time Running Out, was released in 1981 and received wide acclaim for its detailed analysis of the system of apartheid and United States' policies toward the Southern Africa region.

Current Volunteer Activities

On a volunteer basis, Ms. Hernández is active in many organizations at the national and local levels. She is Chair Emerita of the Board of Trustees of a socially responsible investment group, Citizens Funds (formerly called Working Assets Common Holdings); Vice-Chair of the National Urban Coalition; Vice-Chair of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union; Coordinator of the San Francisco African American Agenda Council. Ms. Hernández also serves on the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, a private group created in 1981 to monitor federal government activities which affect civil rights progress. She is the Treasurer of a small local charitable foundation, the Eleanor R. Spikes Memorial Fund and the Chair and a founding member of the Coalition for Economic Equity (representing the concerns of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in San Francisco). She serves in an advisory capacity to the Girls' After School Academy (GASA) in San Francisco, the Campaign to Abolish Poverty, the California Academy of Sciences, Leadership California and the Urban Habitat Program. She is also a founder of, and advisor to, the Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Institute in San Francisco. Since 1982, she has been an active participant in several citizens' groups organized to encourage public and private cooperation in solving local and regional community problems. She is a Life Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society and a Life Trustee of The Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. She also serves on the Boards of the California Commission for Campaign Financing and the Center for Governmental Studies, and is a member of the University of California San Francisco Foundation. She is Chair of the CAlifornia Women's Agenda CAWA), a statewide network of more than 500 women's organizations tailoring the UN Platform for Action (adopted in Beijing, China in September 1995) to the needs of California women and girls. She is on the Board of Advisors of the National Women's Museum, which opened in Dallas in the Fall of 2000, and is also on the Board of Advisors of Continuum, an AIDS counseling and service group. She is a founding member and coordinator for Black Women Stirring the Waters, a discussion group in the San Francisco Bay Area which, in 1998, published a book of essays by forty-four of its members (including Ms. Hernandez). She was recently named to the Board of Overseers of the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women and, by Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr., to the San Francisco Independent Task Force on Affirmative Action in Public Contracting

Past Community Activities

In the past, Ms. Hernández has been the National President of the National Organization for Women (NOW) (1970-1971); Chair of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women at what is now the Department of Health and Human Services (she served during the administrations of Secretary Joseph Califano and Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris (1978 through 1980); an officer and member of the Mount Zion Hospital Board of Directors in San Francisco; a Board member of the City's Westside Community Mental Health Center; a Commissioner on the San Francisco Public Schools Commission and chair of the California Council for the Humanities. She was a founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus (she chaired the issues session at the NWPC founding convention in 1971); a founding member of Black Women Organized for Action, Bay Area Black Women United, and the National Hook-Up of Black Women. She was also an advisor to the National Institute for Women of Color. and served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Women Policy Studies. Ms. Hernández served as a Board member and Project Director for the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing; a member of the Housing Committee, Association of Bay Area Governments; advisor to the BART Impact Study Committee of the National Academy of Engineering; a consultant to the Equal Opportunity Committee of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA); a Commissioner on Bay Vision 2020, a group which advocated for regional cooperation in land use planning; a Board member of Operation Civic Serve, which focused on encouraging youth to become community volunteers; and a Board member of The Garden Project and the Pesticide Education Center She was a ten-year member (1976-1985) of the Board of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the first national foundation dedicated to funding feminist issues and organizations. She was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Urban League and a founding Board Member and Northern California Education Committee Chair of Death Penalty Focus, an organization committed to the abolition of the death penalty. She was one of ten Black women who, in 1972, joined together to create Sapphire Publishing Company which has published 70 Soul Secrets of Sapphire and Toward Viable Directions in Postsecondary Education. Awards and Citations

Ms. Hernández has been the recipient of numerous awards and citations for her community work. She was chosen Woman of the Year by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California in 1961; one of the Ten Most Distinguished Women in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 by the San Francisco Examiner; and one of the Ten Women Who Make A Difference by the San Francisco League of Women Voters in 1985. She was honored by her alma mater, Howard University, for Distinguished Postgraduate Achievement in the Fields of Labor and Public Service in 1968; and by the National Urban Coalition in 1985 for distinguished service to urban communities.

In 1989, the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union Foundation presented her with the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award and the Center for Women Policy Studies named her a Jessie Bernard Wise Woman. Equal Rights Advocates commended her in 1981 for her contributions to women's rights, and the Friends of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women honored her in 1984. Trinity Baptist Church in San Mateo County gave her a Bicentennial Award in 1976, and Glide Memorial United Methodist Church cited her for humanitarian services in 1986. She has been named an HonOSP-RAry Member of Gamma Phi Delta Sorority and was granted an HonOSP-RAry G.E.D. by the now defunct East Bay Skills Center in Oakland. She has received Awards of Appreciation from the Negro Political Action Association of California (1965); the National Institute for Women of Color (1987); the Western District Conference of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs (1988) and the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau. The San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce presented her with its Parren J. Mitchell Award for dedicated and distinguished service to the Black community in 1985. She is also a recipient of the Praisesinger Award, presented by the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society in 1991. She was named a Fabulous Feminist by the San Francisco Chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1992 and, in 1995, received the Silver Spur Award of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. In June 1996, she was given the Eleanor Roosevelt

Woman of the Year award by the San Francisco Democratic Women's Forum; and in July 1996 was honored by the San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for her work in support of minority-owned and women-owned businesses. In August 1996, she received the Mary Lepper Award from the Women's Caucus of the American Political Science Association and in May 1997 was named a WAVE honoree (Woman of Achievement, Vision and Excellence) by Alumnae Resources in San Francisco. Black Women Organized for Political Action presented her with its Ella Hill Hutch Award in 1997 and she was one of the Portraits of Success recognized by the African American Community Entrustment in December 1997.

Ms. Hernández is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and is listed in Who's Who in America, Foremost Women in Communications, the Negro Almanac, Who's Who Among Black Americans, Who's Who of American Women, and Community Leaders and Noteworthy Americans. She is one of the women featured in Gifted Woman (published by Howard Schatz in 1992) and in Notable Black American Women and Epic Lives, both edited by Jessie Carney Smith. She also wrote the introduction to the book Jury Woman by Mary Timothy, foreperson on the jury which acquitted Angela Davis of the charges of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy in 1972.

Family

Her parents (now deceased), Charles and Ethel Clarke, naturalized citizens of the United States, were born and reared in Jamaica, West Indies, settled in New York City in the 1920s, met and were married in 1923. She has an older brother (Charles) and a younger brother (Norris), both of whom are engineers - one living in Southern California and the other in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Divorced, she has no children but has three nieces, two nephews, a great-nephew, and a cat named Misty.