Founder and vice president of Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust (LANLT) Misty Sanford '00 was recently on campus to speak to students and receive a Poet Award for Alumni Achievement.
The LANLT is a nonprofit organization that converts blighted parcels of land into neighborhood parks, gardens, and community centers. Sanford is also a partner in the Los Angeles office of Munger, Tolles & Olson and practices real estate and land use law. She has an active pro bono real estate and land use transactional practice assisting nonprofits in acquiring, leasing, developing, and preserving land.
Sanford is also a founder and treasurer of For People of Color, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering students of color to attend law school and become attorneys.
After graduating from Whittier, Sanford attended UCLA School of Law, where she completed the program in public interest law and policy, was chair of the Public Interest Law Foundation, and a Hagman Land Use and Planning Scholar.
Click here to watch Sanford's talk on YouTube.
Sociology alumna Jane I. Honikman '67 was also on campus to speak her work as a maternal mental heath advocate. Her presentation, "My Chance to Make Social Change: from Whittier to Washington," describes her journey as a new mother in the 1970s seeking personal support to the founding of a global social support network in 1987. Her life's work has been to understand the social basis of viewing negative emotional responses to parenthood as not an individual problem but a larger one related to the way birth, families, and child rearing are treated in society.
