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"Nominated by her friend Bilen Mesfin, 31, Oakland What Bilen says about her friend Lateefah:&amp;amp;#8220;I met Lateefah when we were both working for the San Francisco District Attorney&amp;amp;#8217;s office in 2006. Lateefah grew up in a single-mother household in San Francisco&amp;amp;#8217;s rough, drug-ridden Fillmore neighborhood. When she was 16, she held down a job at Taco Bell, where she worked eight hours a day while going to school. Her family struggled, but her mom instilled the belief in Lateefah that she could make the neighborhood a better place, and she did. She wanted to work at the Center for Young Women&amp;amp;#8217;s Development so badly that she offered to volunteer on top of all her other responsibilities. Her hard work paid off, and she was soon hired as an outreach worker and community organizer. She would walk the streets to educate young women about H.I.V., self-defense and career options. When she was 19, she was appointed executive director of the organization, becoming one of the youngest leaders of a social service agency in the country. Lateefah is so inspiring because she lived the life of the people she helps. In spite of the work she was doing, she became pregnant when she was 18, and she is now a single mother to a beautiful 13-year-old girl. She doesn&amp;amp;#8217;t hide her humble beginnings; she owns them, which makes the work she does that much more empowering. Lateefah grew the Center for Young Women&amp;amp;#8217;s Development into an organization with a $1.2 million budget, serving 3,500 women annually. Then she went on to the Lawyers&amp;amp;#8217; Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was named executive director this past January. As a black woman, I would have loved to have had a role model like Lateefah to look up to when I was growing up. I have never met a person at her level who really practices everything they preach. She uses her charismatic, magnetic and inspiring personality to raise awareness about the causes she cares most about&amp;amp;#8212;and when she talks, people listen. But whether she&amp;amp;#8217;s speaking at the United Nations, which she has done, or on the streets, she is the exact same woman. So even though she&amp;amp;#8217;s the youngest female recipient of the MacArthur Foundation &amp;amp;#8216;genius award&amp;amp;#8217;&amp;amp;#8212;and several other accolades&amp;amp;#8212;what I admire most about her is the way she has shown me, and many others, that it&amp;amp;#8217;s not where you come from but where you&amp;amp;#8217;re going that matters. Lateefah donated most of the $500,000 from the &amp;amp;#8216;genius award&amp;amp;#8217; to the Center for Young Women&amp;amp;#8217;s Development and used the rest of it to put herself through college. She&amp;amp;#8217;s graduating in May 2010!&amp;amp;#8221; Vote for Lateefah Simon now!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/magazine/2009/10/women-of-your-year-lateefah-simon>