Board Members

Jennifer Mayer-Glenn, Chair

Jennifer was born in Columbia, Missouri but moved to Utah at a very young age. She embraces her Latina roots. She is a local public special education teacher who is passionate about educational justice for all students. She graduated from the University of Utah with a B.A. in Spanish in 1996 and completed a Master of Education at Westminster College in 2006 with a focus on the problem of the overrepresentation of minorities in special education. She is also an active participant in the grassroots democratic process. Jennifer lives with her husband and two children in Salt Lake City.

Esperanza Granados, Vice Chair

Esperanza Granados grew up in Idaho and moved to Utah after graduating from college. She attended Idaho State University and obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies. Esperanza was born in Mexico and immigrated with her family to Idaho as a child where her father worked as a migrant worker. Esperanza’s experience as an immigrant in the U.S. stemmed her interest in human rights and equal protection. She graduated from the S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2006 and is currently an attorney in the fields of criminal and immigration law.

Walter Jones, Secretary

Walter Jones is a native of Wyoming and has lived in Salt Lake City since 1982.  He is the assistant head of the Special Collections Department at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library.  He has a master’s degree in history from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in library science from Brigham Young University.  He served in the army as a Korean linguist.  Now he is active in community affairs and is on the Greater Avenues Community Council and the GACC’s street fair committee for which he was the chairperson in 2005 and 2006.  He and his wife, Helen, both teach at Salt Lake Community College.

Rebecca Hall

Rebecca Hall, J.D., PhD, is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. After graduating from U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1989, she represented low income families for seven years in the area of housing law and in anti-discrimination cases. After years of experiencing how the structured patterns of race, class and gender deformed the possibilities of justice through the legal system, it became urgent for her to go back to the study of history of the law and its relation to the creation and maintenance of systems of oppression. She received her Ph.D. at U.C. Santa Cruz in history in 2004, was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, and relocated to Salt Lake City in 2007 after being invited by the law school to be a visiting professor. Her academic research is in the area of historical formations of racialized gender, legal history and current legacies of slavery.

Jon Jepsen

Jon grew up on a farm in southeastern Idaho and graduated from the University of Utah in Business Finance. He has been in the insurance industry for over 14 years working as a broker, agent, and risk manager. Jon remains involved in the community through citizen activism, grassroots campaigns, and human rights advocacy. In addition to serving as a commissioner on the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission, some of the other boards he serves on include the Utah Pride Center, Selective Service System, Utah Association of Independent Insurance Agents, Young Agents of Utah, Salt Lake Association of Independent Insurance Agents, Encompass/Allstate Insurance National Advisory Board, SAFECO Insurance Advisory Board, Workers Compensation Fund of Utah Agents Council, and Queer Utah Aquatic Club (QUAC). Jepsen is also a Surplus Lines Broker in numerous states, and a Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC) designee.

T. Christopher Wharton

Chris is a fifth-generation resident of the Salt Lake Valley. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science from Westminster College in 2006 and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Utah – S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2009. Chris has been involved in several state and national political campaigns, and has helped lead a number of local grassroots campaigns and organization. In addition to serving on the Human Rights Commission, Chris serves on the board member of the Young Democrats of Utah as Vice Chair of the Young Professionals Caucus. He is also serves on the Board of Directors for Utah Lawyers for Human Rights and is an active member of Equality Utah. Chris currently resides near 9th and 9th in the East Liberty Park Community Council area.

Susan J. Wurtzburg

Susan was born in Canada, and lived for a decade in Christchurch, New Zealand, before moving to Salt Lake City in June, 2004. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology, and a post-graduate certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Her research specializations include gender, ethnicity, domestic violence, and addictive disorders. Susan teaches Sociology at the University of Utah, and Westminster College; she also works part-time for Utah Dispute Resolution, a non-profit mediation company. She provides pro bono mediation in several Utah courts, serves on the Board of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, and facilitates a book group for the Cancer Wellness House. Susan enjoys outdoor activities along the Wasatch range.