Rhonda Rios Kravitz has lived nights like last spring’s awards night many times before.
Kravitz, City College Dean of Administration, has stood in front of her peers and accepted an award of some kind almost every year since 1993. Those honors include recognitions from the YMCA Outstanding Woman Award and the Dolores Huerta Activist Award. This year is no different.
The Center for African Peace & Conflict Resolution (CAPCR) honored Kravitz with the 2010 Peace and Justice Award to celebrate her longevity in advocating equity and social justice.
“She was chosen for this award as a result of her efforts over many years to address issues of peace and justice on campus,” said Patricia A. Holmes, administrative support coordinator at California State University, Sacramento. “Individuals on campus acknowledged the alignment between her work and the mission of CAPCR by sending her name forward to receive the Center’s Peace and Justice Award.”
“My recognition was over a 20-year span,” Kravitz said. “I was very humbled by this award; it came to me as a very special award.”
Kravitz has worked with City College’s Rainbow Alliance and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) to help provide social justice to underrepresented populations.
As the National Chair for the NACCS in 2000-01, Kravitz looked to enhance opportunities for Chicano students, to increase the number of Chicano faculty and support Chicano curriculum in colleges and universities.
“For me, it is really looking at human dignity for all, trying to enable the underrepresented population to achieve in the same way,” Kravitz says.
Providing social justice to a community can be as simple as mentoring a student or as big as teaching a non-English-speaking community how to use a library.
The Merced Public Library realized it had a number of Hmong users who were not using its facilities to its full potential. Kravitz, as the ethnic services consultant for the California State Library in 2007, used government grants given to her to help fund programs for the library.
“This library created a great program where they hired Hmong employees that were really committed to making a difference, obviously by translation,” Kravitz says. “But also they created a ‘New Americans’ [book]shelf that provides books for children and books getting social services.”
Kravitz’s dedication has won the respect of her peers.
“She’s very energetic [and] very much a people person,” says City College Public Services Librarian Jeffrey Karlsen. “[She is] extremely interested in the service division of the college and very interested in new projects.”
