Victoria Balderas is a student at Sacramento High School who chairs ¡Escuelas Yes! ¡Pintos No! ESPINO promotes access to education and alternatives to incarceration and works to address the school-to-jail pipeline that many underrepresented youth face in the Central Valley. Under Balderas’ leadership, ESPINO organized two conferences focusing on juvenile justice issues and education inequity.
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Keith Bergthold is the CEO and founder of the Relational Culture Institute, a Fresno-based non-profit that identifies, develops, and nurtures grassroots community leaders who work in the areas of healthcare, housing, employment, and safety. Keith earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno, and a master’s degree in organizational behavior from the California School of Professional Psychology.
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Maria Blanco, Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, has over 20 years of experience as a civil rights attorney, litigator, and advocate in the struggle for immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and racial justice. A graduate of Boalt Hall, Ms. Blanco has successfully litigated important civil rights cases establishing that undocumented workers are covered by federal anti-discrimination laws, eliminating the San Francisco Fire Department’s discriminatory entrance exam, and challenging UC Berkeley’s discriminatory admissions policy.
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Bill Camp is the Executive Secretary of the Sacramento Central Labor Council, which represents 140,000 AFL-CIO union families. He is also Vice-Chair of Sacramento Works, which oversees training programs for high-wage and high-skilled jobs in Sacramento County. He has developed job training for underemployed workers and holds leadership positions in many community organizations. Mr. Camp earned a B.A. from the University of Oregon and a M.A. from Duke University.
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John Amson Capitman is Executive Director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute and Professor of Public Health at the College of Health and Human Services, California State University, Fresno. Dr. Capitman currently conducts research on key San Joaquin Valley health challenges and environmental influences. His past work addressed racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Dr. Capitman was a post-doctoral fellow with the California Department of Health Services, and received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Duke University.
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Paul Cort is a staff attorney in the Oakland office of Earthjustice whose projects focus on air quality issues in the San Joaquin Valley. Prior to joining Earthjustice, Mr. Cort was an attorney in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and holds a B.S. and an M.S. in environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Denard W. Davis is the president and CEO of D&D Associates, a management consulting and diversity training firm located in Merced, California and Smyrna, Georgia, that works with businesses, schools, churches, community-based organizations, and municipal governments. He is the former Assistant County Superintendent of Human Resources and Affirmative Action Officer of the Merced County Office of Education. In the past, Mr. Davis has worked as a science teacher and athletic coach, and directed the Merced County Neighborhood Youth Corps.
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Teresa DeAnda is the Central Valley Representative of Californians for Pesticide Reform, where she educates Southern Central Valley communities about the hazards of pesticide use. Additionally, she founded and directs El Comité Para el Bienestar de Earlimart, which educates residents of Earlimart (Tulare County) and surrounding towns about the dangers of day-to-day pesticide drift and provides information about pesticide drift emergencies.
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Alegría De La Cruz is a staff attorney for the California Rural Legal Assistance’s Indigenous Farmworker Project in Fresno whose work focuses on issues facing California’s 100,000 indigenous farm workers. Ms. De La Cruz litigates and provides advice and counsel, brief services, and administrative advocacy, and in the areas of wage and hour law, housing, civil rights and discrimination, and environmental justice. She earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Boalt Hall.
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Gary Dymski is the founding director of the UC Center Sacramento. Previously he founded and led the Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at UC Riverside, where he also served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Professor Dymski has received numerous academic and professional awards, provided policy advice to governments and community-based organizations in several nations, and published widely. He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.P.A. from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Reginald Fair is a co-founder of the Coalition of African American and Latinos for Achievement, Now! and founder of R. Fair & Associates, a leading public affairs firm specializing in public policy advocacy. He has more than 25 years’ experience in state and local government and politics, and has advised numerous community-based agencies and California school districts. He has been a consultant to the State Assembly Education Committee and a key advisor to the California Legislature on education issues. He received a B.A. and an M.A. at UC Santa Barbara.
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Caroline Farrell is Directing Attorney of the Delano office of the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, a non-profit environmental justice organization that represents low-income communities of color in Kern, Kings, Tulare and Fresno counties. At CRPE, she represents clients on issues related to dairy development, hazardous wastes, and industrial pollution. Ms. Farrell graduated from Bates College and the Golden Gate University School of Law.
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Mary Louise Frampton is the Director of the Boalt Hall Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice and a Lecturer-in-Residence at Boalt Hall where she teaches restorative justice and law and social justice. For 30 years she was a civil rights lawyer in the San Joaquin Valley, first as Directing Attorney of the Madera office of California Rural Legal Assistance and then in a firm that she established in Fresno. She worked for farmworkers and small farmers in legislative campaigns and litigation to enforce federal reclamation law and represented plaintiffs in employment discrimination and other civil rights actions.
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Isao Fujimoto founded the graduate program in Community Development at UC Davis and is the emeritus director of the UC Davis Asian American Studies Program. Currently, he serves as Project Facilitator for the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship. Mr. Fujimoto is also the academic coordinator for the Rural Development Leadership Network Institute, and has served on many organizational boards including Global Exchange, Food First, and the California Institute for Rural Studies.
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Marshall Ganz is a Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University who teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements, civic associations, and politics. After volunteering as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi in the early 1960s, he joined the United Farm Workers, where he worked as an organizer for 16 years. During the 1980s, he developed grassroots organizing programs and voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. He received a B.A., M.P.H., and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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Kate Gordon is a Senior Associate at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a “think and do tank” located at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ms. Gordon also directs the Strategy Center for the Apollo Alliance, a national collaboration between labor, environmental groups, business and community organizations focused on achieving energy independence and creating good jobs in rural America. She has a J.D. from Boalt Hall and a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley.
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Mark Grossi is the natural resources writer for The Fresno Bee. A newspaper journalist for 29 years, he is also the author of “The Longstreet Highroad Guide to the California Sierra Nevada”, a natural history guidebook. Mr. Grossi earned his B.S. from the California Polytechnic Institute, San Luis Obispo, and his M.A. from Fresno State University, and is a former Knight Science Writing Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Kevin D. Hamilton is a Registered Respiratory Therapist who has led the Asthma Program at Community Medical Center in Fresno since its inception in 1993. He is a founding member of Medical Advocates for Healthy Air, and was recently appointed Program Coordinator for the UC San Francisco Chronic Respiratory Disease Research Institute in Fresno. Mr. Hamilton also serves as Fresno County’s environmental representative to the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District.
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Angela P. Harris is a Professor of Law at Boalt Hall, Faculty Chair of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, and a co-chair of LatCrit. She is a prolific scholar whose research crosses disciplinary bounds, ranging through outsider jurisprudence like critical race feminism, community economic justice, law and culture, and environmental justice. Professor Harris received the 2003 Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction, and the 2003 Mathew O. Tobriner Public Service Award. She earned her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago.
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Bill Ong Hing is a Professor of Law and Asian American Studies at UC Davis who also directs the law school’s clinical program. Professor Hing serves on the board of directors of the Asian Law Caucus and the Migration Policy Institute. Throughout his career, he has pursued social justice by combining community work, litigation, and scholarship. Professor Hing is the author of numerous academic and practice-oriented books and articles on immigration policy and race relations. He earned his bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and his J.D. at the University of San Francisco.
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Dolores C. Huerta is a legendary labor organizer and human rights leader. She is president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which focuses on community organizing and leadership training in low-income and under-represented communities. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in Delano, her fearless lobbying resulted in significant advances in economic and voting rights for immigrants. As the main negotiator for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, she successfully negotiated numerous contracts for farm workers, established hiring halls and ranch committees, administered contracts, and conducted over 100 grievance and arbitration procedures. She and Chavez founded the first medical and pension plans and credit union for farm workers and formed the National Farm Workers Service Center which provides affordable housing and broadcasts educational radio programs.
Raised in Stockton, Ms. Huerta was an elementary school teacher before she resigned to begin her career in organizing. Today she teaches a course on community organizing at the University of Southern California and serves as a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which advocates for gender balance. She still travels around the United States to lecture at universities and community organizations about policy issues affecting immigrants, women, and youth.
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Ilene J. Jacobs is Director of Litigation, Advocacy, and Training for California Rural Legal Assistance. She has dedicated her 25-year legal career to advocacy for the housing and civil rights of minority, farmworker, homeless, and other low-income urban and rural communities. She has held leadership positions on state and national task forces and commissions addressing rural poverty. Ms. Jacobs has also taught at the UC Davis School of Law and at Yuba Community College. She received a B.A. from Boston University and a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.
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Andrés Jiménez directs the California Policy Research Center, a University of California public policy research organization. Mr. Jiménez has widely researched, written, and lectured about society and politics in the United States and Mexico, U.S. race and ethnic relations, U.S. immigration policy, and Latin American-U.S. relations. Previously, he coordinated research programs at the Institute of International Studies and the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley. Jiménez received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and pursued doctoral studies in political science at UC Berkeley.
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Sasha Khokha is a KQED Central Valley Bureau reporter and documentary filmmaker. Prior to contributing to the “California Report,” she reported in Alaska and for National Public Radio. Born in Los Angeles to a Punjabi father and Irish-American mother, she fell in love with radio while wearing waterproof overalls and standing in a four-foot high stream — trying to record jumping salmon. Her latest film, Calcutta Calling, follows the lives of girls adopted in India and moved to rural Swedish-Lutheran Minnesota. She graduated from Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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Ray León is a senior policy analyst for the San Joaquin Valley office of the Latino Issues Forum, a statewide policy and advocacy organization, where he focuses on environmental health and air quality issues. He is the founder of La Raza Unida Foundation, a youth leadership support group, and has been a college instructor and community organizer. Mr. León also serves on the steering committee of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley.
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Philip Martin is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis and Chair of the University of California’s 60-member Comparative Immigration and Integration Program. Professor Martin researches, writes, and testifies before Congress on farm labor, rural poverty, labor migration and population, and immigration issues. In 1994 he received UC Davis’ Distinguished Public Service Award. He studied labor economics and agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received his Ph.D.
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Craig McGarvey is an independent consultant who works with foundations on program development and evaluations. For over a decade he worked at the James Irvine Foundation, serving first as Director of Administration and then as Program Director in Civic Culture, supporting Californians who were interested in shaping the state’s unprecedented demographic diversity into a durable pluralism. Mr. McGarvey holds degrees in English and Engineering from Brown University, and was for many years a high school mathematics teacher and administrator.
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Patience Milrod, a long-time civil rights lawyer and community activist in Fresno, litigates California Environmental Quality Act actions to compel new developments to mitigate air quality and other environmental impacts in various Central Valley communities. Ms. Milrod chaired a Fresno City Council planning group that negotiated with developers to make their projects more community-friendly. She graduated from UC Davis School of Law, and has been a lecturer on topics such as employment and housing discrimination and police misconduct.
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Rick Mines is the former Research Director with the California Institute for Rural Studies and an expert in the field of immigration and economic development. Dr. Mines has widely analyzed education, employment, migration, health, and social service data on farmworkers in Mexico and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley.
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Baldwin Moy is the Directing Attorney of the Madera regional office of California Rural Legal Assistance. In the past he served as Assistant Director to the Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship Program at Howard University School of Law and has been a supervising attorney and staff attorney at numerous other legal services programs nationally. Mr. Moy graduated from the St. Louis University School of Law.
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Brent Newell is a staff attorney at the San Francisco office of the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment who established and leads the Valley Air Quality Project. He joined CRPE’s Delano office in 2000 to lead the Dairy Project as an Equal Justice Fellow. Mr. Newell graduated from UC Santa Cruz and earned his law degree from the University of Oregon School of Law.
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James Oftedal has directed the highly distinguished and successful Central California Consortium for the last nine years. The CCC is the only known Forest Service-funded environmental education, outreach, and recruitment program working with Latino and Southeast Asian communities. As Director of the CCC, he has diversified the Forest Services workforce and provided a model for the creation of employment opportunities in the Valley.
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Noe Paramo is the Central Valley Partnership’s first coordinator and the director of the Immigrant Leaders Fellowship Program. He has worked regionally among immigrant communities for many years as staff with California Rural Legal Assistance and the Great Valley Center. Mr. Paramo holds a B.A. from UC Davis and a J.D. Degree from Hastings College of the Law.
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Amagda Pérez is a lecturer at UC Davis School of Law, where she has served as Supervising Attorney of the Immigration Law Clinic for over ten years. She is also the Executive Director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a Sacramento-based non-profit, and chairs the Board of Directors of the Central Valley Partnership. Ms. Pérez received her B.A. from UC Davis and her J.D. from UC Davis School of Law.
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Steven C. Pitts is a labor specialist with the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education who focuses on union leadership development, job quality and labor activism in the Black community, and labor-community alliances. Previously, Dr. Pitts taught economics at Houston Community College and African American studies at the University of Houston. He also worked in an oil tool factory for eight years and was an active member of Local 1742 of the United Steelworkers of America. Dr. Pitts has a B.A. from Harvard College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Houston.
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Belinda I. Reyes is an assistant professor and founding faculty member at the School of Social Science, Humanities, and the Arts at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on immigration issues and the economic, social, and political progress of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Dr. Reyes holds a B.S. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of several publications.
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Mike Reyes is a senior at One Discover in Stockton who serves as a committee member for the Youth Empowerment Center, a program of Escuelas Yes! Pintos No!. Mr. Reyes became involved in ESPINO because he believes that it is critical for young people to have a voice in policies – such as education and juvenile justice – that affect their lives.
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Sarah Reyes is former Assembly Member for the 31st Assembly District of California, which encompasses a large portion of Fresno County and parts of Tulare County. Currently she is the Executive Director of Community Food Bank, which partners with over 160 agencies throughout Fresno and Madera counties and portions of Kings County to distribute food to families and individuals in need. She also chairs the California Leadership Fund, which mentors young women of color who want to pursue a career in politics.
Ms. Reyes served with distinction during her six-year tenure in the California State Legislature, and has served on several boards and commissions representing a diverse and charitable group of organizations. Upon her election in 1998, she became the first Latina and only the second woman from the San Joaquin Valley to serve in the California State Assembly. She chaired a number of committees, and is credited with landmark legislation to protect the safety of farmworkers, to increase the accountability of California’s charter school system, to protect consumers’ privacy, to empower survivors of domestic violence, and to require education about the state’s latest sexual harassment laws.
Prior to being elected to the Legislature, Sarah served as Assistant to the Chancellor for the State Center Community College District and worked as a field reporter and news anchor for KSEE TV-24 in Fresno and as a field reporter for KCRA TV-3 in Sacramento. She is a graduate of Fresno City College and California State University, Fresno.
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Cruz Reynoso, ’58, is the Boochever and Bird Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality at the University of California at Davis. The son of Mexican immigrants, Reynoso rose to become the first Latino to serve on California’s highest court. First he gained national recognition as Director of California Rural Legal Assistance where he fought for the rights of the rural poor from 1968 to 1972.
Reynoso served as a jurist with the 3rd District Court of Appeal for California in Sacramento from 1976 to 1982 and as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court from 1982 to 1987. Since 1993, he has been an active member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, serving as vice chair since 1994.
Reynoso also taught at the University of New Mexico from 1972 to 1976 and at the UCLA School of Law from 1991-2001. His scholarly publications have included articles on cultural diversity, educational equity, affirmative action, and Cesar Chavez. His most recent scholarship is “Hispanics in the Criminal Justice System,” a chapter in “An Agenda for the Twenty-First Century: Hispanics in the United States.” He teaches in the areas of civil rights, appellate advocacy, labor law, professional responsibility and remedies.
Reynoso has served on numerous other federal, state and professional boards and commissions concerned with civil rights, immigration and refugee policy, government reform, the administration of justice, legal services for the indigent and education. He was President Carter’s appointee on the Commission on the Immigration and Refugee Policy from 1979–1981. In 2000 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, for his lifelong devotion to public service. He is also the recipient of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation’s Hispanic Heritage Award in Education.
Reynoso earned a law degree from Boalt Hall in 1958 and studied constitutional law at the National University of Mexico in 1958-59 under a Ford Foundation Fellowship. He received an associate of arts degree from Fullerton College in 1951 and a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College.
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Fred Ross, Jr., a national organizer for the health care division of the Service Employees International Union, has more than 30 years of labor, community, and political organizing experience. From 1970-76, Mr. Ross organized farmworkers for the United Farm Workers in California, Oregon, and Washington. While with the UFW, he coordinated many successful strikes, boycotts, and legislative campaigns, including the historic Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.
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Robert Rubin, a civil rights attorney for the past 25 years, is the Legal Director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Rubin is co-lead counsel in a novel suit challenging the discriminatory delivery of municipal services to Latino residents of Modesto. He was previously the ACLU staff counsel in Jackson Mississippi.
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Barry Sommer is a licensed educational psychologist and certified school psychologist currently in private practice with the Helix Group in Visalia. For almost thirty years, he served as the Director of Student and Family Services for the Pixley Unified School District. Dr. Sommer also oversees mental health services at Porterville Community College, and directs a Tulare County collaboration of youth service providers. He graduated from Cornell University and Queens College, with graduate degrees in psychology and education.
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James E. Taubert is the Executive Director of the Madera Redevelopment Agency, which is responsible for a redevelopment project area of over 3,600 acres. He has 25 years of experience in organizational, economic development, redevelopment, and neighborhood revitalization strategies, including six years at the Madera County Industrial Development Commission. Mr. Taubert earned B.A. and M.P.A degrees from California State University, Stanislaus.
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Michael B. Teitz is Emeritus Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1963 to 1998, and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. He is also currently Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor at UC Merced. His recent research has been in the fields of regional planning, local economic development, and housing planning and policy. Professor Teitz holds a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics, an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Manuel Toledo is Lead Organizer for Fresno Area Congregations Together, working on a voter empowerment project with communities in Fresno to ensure that the emerging majority of Latino voters in the area have real political power and that candidates are held accountable to their communities.
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Manuel Valencia, III, is a co-founder of the Coalition for African-American and Latino Academic Achievement, Now! and a Senior Committee Consultant with the California State Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, specializing in environmental justice issues. He serves on the Executive Board of the La Raza Lawyers Association of Sacramento. He graduated from Claremont McKenna College and the U.C. Davis School of Law.
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Richard Walker is Professor and past Chair of Geography at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1975. He has recently published a history of the state’s agricultural system, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (2004), which tells the story of how capitalism developed the California countryside into the leading agrarian production complex in the United States. Professor Walker earned his B.A. from Stanford University and a Doctorate in Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
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Carol Whiteside is the Founder and President of the Great Valley Center, a non-profit think tank located in Modesto. For more than 25 years, she has worked in public service. Prior to founding the Great Valley Center, Ms. Whiteside served for seven years on the staff of Governor Pete Wilson. She was elected to the Modesto City School Board, and the Modesto City Council, and served as the Mayor of Modesto from 1987 to 1991. Ms. Whiteside is a graduate of UC Davis.
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Blong Xiong is Deputy Director of the Fresno Center for New Americans. At FCNA, he has headed several projects, including the Hmong Voters Education Project and Hmong Cancer Research Project. He currently supervises the Living Well Project, Hmong Resettlement Health System Navigation Project, Hmong Family Care Project, and Accelerated English as a Second Language Project. Mr. Xiong earned his B.A./B.S. from Marian College and his M.B.A. from National University.
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