Zelle Hofmann Announces 2013 Diversity in Law Scholarship Recipient
October 1, 2013Zelle Hofmann Voelbel & Mason LLP is pleased to announce Perla Edith Parra as the recipient of the firm’s Diversity in Law Scholarship for 2013. Parra will receive a scholarship to be applied towards her law school tuition, fees and text books. She will also be assigned a mentor at the firm for her remaining law school career.
Parra is a second-year law student at UC Hastings, where she is in moot court, working as a teaching assistant for Legal Writing and Research, and learning new skills with the Workers’ Rights Clinic in addition to her regular course load, law journal, and extracurricular activities.
During her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, she also organized labor rights campaigns for farm workers and mentored at-risk youth in an after-school program. Upon graduation, she served underrepresented communities as a case manager for the Marin Child Care Council, where she advocated for early childhood education and certified over 120 low-income families to receive critical childcare subsidies. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in anthropology, Parra returned to school and earned a Masters in Public Administration, with honors, from Cornell University, where she also was president of the Women in Public Policy and the Latino Graduate Student Coalition. As a graduate student, she worked with the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development in South Africa to promote job creation and opportunities for women in business. After completing her master’s degree, she spent a year in Chiang Mai, Thailand working with The Human Rights and Development Foundation on human rights impact litigation and volunteering in a migrant camp teaching English to Burmese immigrants.
Parra was born in Los Angeles, but grew up moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Tecolotlan, a small town in Jalisco, Mexico. By the time she graduated from high school, she, her mother, and brother had moved over 30 times. “Home,” she said, “transformed into a fluid, metaphorical borderland between seemingly incongruous worlds: my American nationality, my Mexican ethnicity, and my personal identity. I was an immigrant and a citizen.”
The Diversity in Law Scholarship is the keystone of the firm's Diversity Outreach Plan and was created for first year law students who either (1) are a member of a diverse group that is historically underrepresented in the private practice of law; or (2) demonstrate a long-standing commitment to diversity that will be furthered by award of the scholarship. To learn more about the Diversity in Law Scholarship and Zelle Hofmann's commitment to diversity, please click here.
