Torie Osborn

Torie Osborn is an activist, author, community organizer, political strategist, and blogger living in Los Angeles. Foremost among her many platforms for progressive leadership in the last 35 years have been service as adviser to L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, with whom she crafted plans to overcome homelessness in the city, and as executive director of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles. The foundation is one of the leading community-building grantmakers in the U.S., giving away more than $32 million dollars since 1976. Under Osborn's leadership, between 1997 and 2005, Liberty Hill quadrupled giving and developed innovative grassroots mobilization programs focused on innovative programs on environmental justice, leadership development, and voter engagement involving Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, African American, immigrant, and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities.

Osborn has said that her motivation for working for social justice dates back to her childhood when, while visiting Spain during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, she witnessed food riots. She also credits the late James Weinstein, founder and longtime publisher of Chicago-based news magazine In These Times, with providing her an important career break in 1976 by inviting her to Illinois from Vermont to serve as the magazine’s first circulation manager.

Osborn went on to be a key organizer in the epic fight in 1978 in California to defeat the first statewide ballot measure attacking gay and lesbian people and threatening investigation and termination of any public school teacher who dared speak with tolerance on the subject. Her work contributed to the defeat of the Briggs Initiative, a success also chronicled in the film "Milk," commercially released to large crowds and rave reviews in November 2008 and depicting the path-breaking life and candidacies of the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Osborn has led the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and in 1996 published an activist memoir, Coming Home to America: A Roadmap to Gay and Lesbian Empowerment. In 2008, after working for the election of Barack Obama, Osborn has blogged about Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment eliminating the freedom to marry for same-sex couples that California voters narrowly approved on Nov. 4, and the need for progressives to revisit the history of religious-right attacks on freedom in the late 1970s. She highlights the crucial example of Harvey Milk in building bridges between the gay and lesbian movement and the labor movement. Vital partnerships forged between various progressive movements proved indispensable to beating Briggs in 1978, and Osborn reminds LGBT leaders that a failure to build similar bridges this past year facilitated passage of Prop 8. More of Osborn's insights can be found here.
 

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Past Progressive Victory Bloggers of the Month  
 
 * Ron Buckmire
 * Andrés Duque
 * Mara Kiesling
 * Facing South
 * Robert Reich
 * Earl Ofari Hutchinson
 * Tennessee Guerilla Women
 * Lane Hudson
 * Bluelatinos.org
 * Richard Hasen
 * Adele Stan