Alma Robinson

Alma Robinson, Executive Director of California Lawyers for the Arts (CLA), has led the organization’s Arts in Corrections Initiative for the past 10 years. CLA, founded in 1974 as Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, is a multi-faceted arts service organization that provides legal support, alternative dispute resolution services, educational programs and advocacy for the arts and justice reform. She was honored by Americans for the Arts with its 2021 Michael Newton Award, which recognizes an individual for his or her innovation in developing arts and business partnerships for the arts and/or long-term achievement in effective and creative techniques to engage the private sector.

She serves as an informal liaison between the Free at Last Coalition and the Abolish Slavery National Network, an organization that advocates to eliminate the exception clauses in many state constitutions, as well as the U.S. Constitution. She is also a member of the Social Justice Working Group at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which joined forces in 2020 with All of Us or None and other justice reform organizations to help pass Proposition 17, a measure that expanded voting rights for people on parole in California.

In 2011, in collaboration with the William James Association and the California Arts Council, Alma led a successful demonstration project that showed the benefits of arts programs in correctional institutions through evidence-based research. As a result, the state’s stellar Arts in Corrections programs, which had been defunded in 2003, were restored and now receive approximately $8 million/year from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for arts classes in all 35 state prisons. She also led a successful multi-year demonstration project that took place in 15 county jails throughout California.

As part of CLA’s Arts in Corrections Initiative, Alma produced a series of three national conferences on Arts in Corrections that were attended by artists and justice advocates from five foreign countries and more than 25 states. With major support from the Art for Justice Fund, she also facilitated a series of Art for Justice Forums in 2018 in six states – Michigan, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, New York and California. With grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Art for Justice Fund, she is currently working with state and local arts council leaders to expand arts in corrections programs in New York, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas and Ohio. With support from the NEA, the San Diego Commission on Arts and Culture, and San Diego State University, CLA is also starting a pilot project to place people returning from prison in paid internships with arts organizations in San Diego.

A native of Winston-Salem, N.C., Alma is a graduate of Middlebury College, where she received a B.A. degree with honors in history, and Stanford Law School. Prior to joining CLA, she was a journalist at the Washington Star, served as Program Coordinator and Lecturer with Stanford’s African and African American Studies Program, and taught a course called “Constitutional Law and the Black Community” in the Department of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

She has served on numerous boards including Mills College, the Urban School, California Arts Advocates, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the San Francisco Opera Association, ArtSpace Development Corporation, Grace Cathedral Corporation and Cathedral School for Boys. Her civic involvement includes previous terms on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee. She is a Fellow of the Wallace A. Gerbode Foundation.