Lara Ballard, Esq.
MEA Co-chair
 Lara
Ballard attended Georgetown University on an Army ROTC
scholarship from 1987-1991. She was commissioned as
a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery.
In March 1992 she was assigned to the 1st Battalion,
7th Air Defense Artillery Regiment (PATRIOT) in Kaiserslautern,
Germany. In the fall of 1992, she deployed with her
battery to Kuwait in support of Operation Southern Watch.
She went on to serve as Platoon Leader, Executive Officer
and Battalion Assistant S-3/Operations Officer before
leaving active duty in 1995 to attend Columbia Law School.
She later clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit and currently practices law in Washington,
DC.
Lara has been a committed activist on the issue of gays
in the military since 2001. She is a dedicated supporter
of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) and
served on the board of American Veterans for Equal Rights
(AVER). She co-chaired SLDN's National Dinner in 2001,
and co-chaired AVER's National Convention in Washington,
DC in 2004. Her story is featured on line with the Documenting
Courage Project, a joint venture between SLDN, AVER,
and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), as well as in Zsa
Zsa Gershick's 2005 book Secret Service: Untold Stories
of Lesbians in the Military. She has spearheaded the
development of MEA's grassroots strategy and coordinates
grassroots activities throughout the state of Virginia.
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