(August 7, 2019) — The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Human Relations Commission will hold its Annual Dinner and Mayor’s Celebration of Diversity Awards on Wednesday, October 30, 2019, at 7 p.m. at the Old National Events Plaza. The keynote speaker will be Fania Davis.

Fania Davis is a leading national voice on restorative justice, a quickly emerging field that invites a fundamental shift in the way we think about and do justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, civil rights trial attorney, restorative justice practitioner, writer, and scholar with a Ph.D. in Indigenous Knowledge. She has a law degree from University of California, Berkeley and practiced as a civil rights trial lawyer for 27 years. Coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era, the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing crystallized within Fania a passionate commitment to social transformation. Numerous honors include the Ella Baker/Septima Clark Award, the Bioneers Changemaker Award, the LaFarge Social Justice Award and the Ebony POWER 100 Award, among others. She is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and the Los Angeles Times named her a New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century. Fania writes and speaks internationally on racial justice and restorative justice, which cuts across areas including interruption of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration, promoting community peace and healing, truth and reconciliation processes to transform harm against African-Americans and gender among other forms of restorative justice. She is the author of the recently published, The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing and U.S. Social Transformation (April 2019).
Mayor Lloyd Winnecke will also present the 2019 Mayor’s Celebration of Diversity Awards at the Human Relations Commission Annual Dinner. The awards recognize businesses, organizations and individuals that embrace and celebrate diversity. Go here to submit a nomination for the Mayor’s Celebration of Diversity Awards. The deadline to nominate is Friday, October 4, 2019.

Ticket donations are $35 per person. Corporate sponsorships are also available. For additional information, please contact the Human Relations Commission at (812) 436-4927, hrc@evansville.in.gov or visit 2019 Human Relations Commission Annual Dinner.