Colorado Coalition for the Homeless competitors

Lorri L. Jean is nationally recognized as one of the most seasoned and effective leaders in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights movement. OUT magazine has twice listed her as one of the 50 most powerful gay and lesbian people in the nation. In 2006, Los Angeles Magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in Los Angeles, and in 2014 it named her one of the ten most inspiring women in Los Angeles. Jean currently serves as CEO of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the world's largest provider of programs and services for LGBT people. Jean has been an activist on LGBT issues since 1979. She served as the lead plaintiff in the successful landmark lawsuit against Georgetown University to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She also was the first openly gay or lesbian person in history to receive a top secret security clearance from the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1989, with her appointment as Deputy Regional Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), she became the highest-ranking openly gay or lesbian person in the Federal government (a distinction she held until 1993 when President Clinton appointed Roberta Achtenberg). In 1993, Jean began her first six-year tenure at the helm of the Center (to which she returned in June 2003). She led the Center through a period of unprecedented expansion, dramatically increasing the number of clients and volunteers, the diversity and volume of services, the number of staff, and the size of the budget. She also oversaw the purchase and renovation of a $7 million facility and built the nation's first $10 million dollar LGBT organization endowment fund. During her second tenure, Jean has returned the Center to financial stability, dramatically expanded programming to 10 locations across Los Angeles while more than quadrupling the revenue budget to $141 million. She also led the Center's historic capital campaign for the $142 million Anita May Rosenstein Campus, which opened in April 2019. From 2001 to 2003, Jean served as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, leading an organizational turnaround that brought the Task Force to financial solvency and increased the annual revenues to what was then an all-time high. Among other program accomplishments, she focused the organization's political efforts at the state and local level by building a field organizing department which orchestrated the defeat of nearly all anti-LGBT ballot measures in the 2001 and 2002 election cycles. Prior to 1993, Jean spent 10 years as an attorney with FEMA, including three years overseeing the disaster response and recovery operations of its largest region, where she was responsible for the management of a staff of 1,000 and a budget of more than $1 billion. Jean holds a Juris Doctorate degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor of Science degree in communication from Arizona State University, and is a member of the bar in California and Washington, D.C. She and her wife, attorney Gina M. Calvelli, live in Hollywood and were legally married in September 2008.