Chris Carson

Chris Carson

President

LWV Greater Los Angeles

Chris has been a League member for forty years, serving at the local, county, state, and national levels. She served many different roles for her local League, including several terms as president. She served on the Board of the LWV of Los Angeles County as Transportation Director as well as Director of Communications. After that, she served for two terms on the Board of the LWV of California as Government Director, from 2005 to 2009. After participating on several LWVUS committees and task forces, Chris was elected as a director of the LWVUS in 2014. In 2016, she was elected as the president of the LWVUS, and served two terms, until 2020. Since then, she has returned to working on redistricting throughout California and other areas of action and advocacy for LWV Greater Los Angeles.

In the midst of all that, in her professional and volunteer life Chris was immersed in the history and governmental processes of our region and nation. Her volunteer work is really an extension of teaching and thinking about history. Her “achievements” in her volunteer work stem from the work she did as an academic. Chris was trained to research, synthesize, talk about, and persuade people to view our system of government in a systematic, objective way. This is what she does as a member of the League of Women Voters.

Chris learned that you have to take risks, be willing to visualize an organization being able to be different from what it is now and be open to using new tools to communicate the message. She was one of the major voices on the national Board insisting that we needed to reevaluate how we carry out our mission; indeed insisting that we need to understand what our mission really is. She jokes that she always asks herself – What would Sam Adams do? What would the suffragists do? Invariably the answer is Challenge the Status Quo. Whatever Chris has achieved, it’s because of what she learned from the careers of all those men and women.