Candidate for
Council Member; City of Palo Alto

Judy is an attorney who specializes in business/transactional law, law reform and public policy, alternative dispute resolution, and nonprofit law and governance. She presently maintains a private practice in Palo Alto.

As an elected member of the Palo Alto City Council since 2000, Judy has been Chair of the Policy and Services Committee, the City-School Liaison Committee, and served on the Legislative Committee of the Peninsula Division of the California League of Cities. Judy was just elected as the Second Vice President of the Santa Clara County Cities Association which advocates for the mutual interests of the fifteen cities in the county. She was also the City's delegate to ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), the Santa Clara County Airports Master Plan Committee, and is currently a member of the Santa Clara County Emergency Preparedness Council. She previously served on the City's Finance Committee and as liaison to the Chamber of Commerce, the Palo Alto Housing Corporation, the Human Relations Commission, the Public Art Commission, the Library Advisory Commission, and the Community Childcare Committee.

In her non-City Council member capacity, Judy currently serves on the Santa Clara County Social Services Advisory Commission, is a Director of the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits and the Sempervirens Fund (preserving old growth redwood forests), and is a member of the SCC Housing Action Coalition and the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Affordable Housing and Teachers.

Following the tragedy of September 11, Judy saw a need for more coordination among emergency service providers and convened the first-ever meetings of professional and semi-professional participants in community preparedness (from fire and police to hospital administrators, ham radio operators and the Red Cross) in order to develop a greater degree of collaboration and to address unmet needs and gaps in service before a disaster might happen. The Palo Alto Preparedness Roundtable is still meeting and developing more coordinated emergency response plans than had previously existed.

To address the needs of neighborhoods in the event of a wide-spread disaster, Judy worked with two colleagues to found a new neighborhood focused emergency preparedness project, Palo Alto REDI (Resources for Emergencies and Disasters Initiative). REDI is focused on preparing for major disasters, and has the goal of helping individuals become more self-sufficient, particularly during the gap of time between a destructive event and the arrival of professional responders. For more information, with important links and downloadable forms to survey your neighborhood and create block captain coordinators, please see paloaltoredi.org.

From 1994 to 2001, she was Executive Director of Kids in Common, a multi-issue, nonpartisan children's advocacy organization for Silicon Valley. Under her leadership, Kids in Common produced the critically-acclaimed Silicon Valley Children's Report Card, and won several awards including recognition from the federal government in 1997 for helping create the California Childhood Immunization Partnership and for creating an initiative that raised the on-time immunization rate for infants in Santa Clara County to be second in the nation.

While with Kids in Common, she was a founder and the first Chair of America's Promise-Silicon Valley, a regional initiative under the auspices of the national America's Promise effort (headed by then Ret. Gen. Colin Powell) to increase volunteerism and access to fundamental resources for at-risk children and youth. Under her leadership, the local initiative succeeded in providing new fundamental resources to nearly 18,000 at-risk youth in Silicon Valley. She also helped create the Children's Immunization Partnership for California, the Cornerstone Project, and the Children and Families First Commission, and was a member of the Santa Clara County Early Childhood Collaborative and a member of the National Association of Child Advocates.

Prior to joining Kids in Common, she headed The Global Fund for Women, an international women's foundation originally based in Silicon Valley.

As a new attorney, she practiced business law in a major national law firm, and was later a law professor for ten years before moving from Berkeley to Palo Alto in the mid-80s. During that time, she was on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Barristers Club where she founded the first Committee on Sex Discrimination and was a member of the State Bar of California Committee on the Disadvantaged and the Law.

During the mid-70s, Judy worked in Bay Area commercial and public television as a legal and consumer affairs reporter and documentary producer, and produced and was the correspondent for mini-documentaries for the California Journal television program. Just prior to becoming an on-air television reporter, she worked as a policy analyst for the late State Sen. Milton Marks of San Francisco.

Judy has served as a Board member of over a dozen nonprofit agencies, including serving as an elected Director of California Women Lawyers representing Santa Clara County and three other South Bay counties and as Vice President in charge of their legislative program. She also served as a member of the VIP Steering Committee of the California Park and Recreation Society during their year-long strategic planning initiative. She also founded three organizations in Palo Alto and the Bay Area dealing with substance abuse prevention, after-school programs for teens, and pediatric AIDS research.

She was a founding Director and is a current Advisory Board member of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, and of the Midpeninsula Community Media Center. She has served as President or Board member of The Committee for Green Foothills, Support Network for Battered Women, American Heart Association, Association for Senior Day Health, Leadership Midpeninsula, Jewish Community Relations Council, JCC, and Palo Alto Council of PTAs.

Judy has received recognition for developing many innovative programs and initiatives in promotion of children and women's rights and opportunities. In the 1970s, she was instrumental in changing California law to provide equal credit rights for married women, and in the 1980s, headed CARAL. The program she conceived and created for Palo Alto area teens called "Safer Summer" received a first place award from the California Park and Recreation Society in 1996 and led to the establishment of Palo Alto's enormously successful teen center, "The House," and the PAY program, a City of Palo Alto after-school program for teens.

Among the numerous honors she has received for her work are the 1996 Merit Award for volunteerism from the California Park and Recreation Society, and the 1997 World of People Award from the Girl Scouts of America/SCC.

A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Judy graduated from the University of Michigan Honors College and Boalt Hall School of Law, U.C. Berkeley, where she was a member of the California Law Review, an honor for students who ranked in the top 10% of their first year class.

Judy and her husband, Jim, have been married for 33 years and have two grown children who attended Palo Alto public schools: Lauren, a University of Michigan graduate and currently a graduate student in architecture at Cal, and Alexander, a graduate of Brown University who works for Google.