As Georgia recovers from the recession as the fastest-growing state in the Southeast, we have a historic opportunity – indeed, an unavoidable mandate – to rebuild our workplaces and educational environments according to true standards of equal treatment and opportunity.  Now, Atlanta Women for Equality can offer a unique chance for our legal community to work in concert with Georgia’s many grass-roots organizations, service providers, and community leaders to further the rights of women and girls substantively and indelibly.

Here are just a few of the many ways Atlanta Women for Equality will have a lasting positive impact on our community:

• By ensuring that low-income women and girls are able to have their day in court, we can disrupt the cycle of large employers and educational institutions discriminating with impunity.  Even if the monetary damages individual clients receive are small, compared to offenders’ deep-pockets, raising community awareness and building a public record of the misconduct are powerful tools to get discriminators to start following the law.

• By offering education to the many women and girls who are unaware of their legal rights or the procedural requirements for complaints, we can empower them to assert those rights effectively and share their knowledge with others.

• By ensuring that low-income women and girls who would normally fall through the cracks have the representation they need, we will provide a crucial legal nexus for other local organizations, service providers, and government agencies to coordinate strategies to combat systemic sex discrimination.

• By offering volunteer opportunities for attorneys and coordinating community-wide efforts to impact Eleventh Circuit jurisprudence, we will galvanize the legal community to effect social change.

• By teaching law students how to use the law to fight sex discrimination, we will help build the foundation for continuing the struggle to achieve equality.

• By providing referrals, guidance and support to women and girls undergoing the difficult complaint process or simply recovering from the multifaceted effects of discrimination—which far too often involves physical violation—we will give them hope, help them understand how capable they are to overcome the objectification of sexist stereotypes and to succeed based on individual merit.