EDUCATORS FOR FAIR CONSIDERATION (E4FC)

LEADERSHIP COUNCIL

AARTI KOHLI

Aarti is the Executive Director at Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, the first organization in the country to represent and promote the legal and civil rights of API communities. She is an experienced nonprofit lawyer, manager and philanthropic adviser with expertise in issues impacting low-income and undocumented immigrants. Recently, she analyzed and conducted advocacy on pending immigration reform legislation in Congress with various national organizations, including the National Immigration Law Center and the Emerson Collective. Formerly, she was the Director of Immigration Policy at the Warren Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law where she developed new projects, engaged funders, managed teams of researchers and organized strategic roundtables and conferences. She was also proud to serve on the UC Berkeley President’s task force on undocumented students. Before moving to California, she worked in Washington, DC, as Judiciary Committee counsel to Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) and as Assistant Legislative Director at UNITE union where she lobbied on behalf of low-income garment workers. 

ABDI SOLTANI

Abdi has served as the Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California since April 2009, where he has focused on broadening the ACLU’s presence in the Central Valley, strengthening the statewide voice of the ACLU in California, and engaging a new generation of community leaders in civil liberties advocacy.

Abdi's first job out of college was working as an organizer and then executive director of Californians for Justice. CFJ was founded in the aftermath of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 to increase the political power and voice of communities of color, immigrants, and young people in California. He then was the executive director of the Campaign for College Opportunity. Immigrants’ rights, educational opportunity, and youth leadership have been constant themes in his work, which make him especially honored to serve E4FC.

Abdi's family immigrated to the U.S. from Iran when he was nine years old. Abdi is a graduate of Stanford University. He was awarded the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship in 1995, the Gerbode Foundation Fellowship in 2002 and the Levi Strauss Foundation Pioneer in Justice Fellowship in 2010. He also serves on the Advisory Board of Pars Equality Center, the Statewide Leadership Council of the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Board of the San Francisco Foundation. 

ANNE STUHLDREHER

Anne is the Director of Financial Justice in the Office of the Treasurer for the City and County of San Francisco. San Francisco is the first city in the nation to launch a Financial Justice Project to assess and reform how fines, fees, and financial penalties impact low income people and people of color.

Throughout her career, Anne has advanced innovations in local economic empowerment, civic engagement and public interest journalism. Anne has a distinguished track record of working with public officials to create public private partnerships that financially empower lower income residents. In San Francisco, she brought people together to initiate and launch initiatives like: Bank on San Francisco (that spurs banks to create starter accounts for the estimated one in five Americans who don’t have them); the Working Families Credit, and Kindergarten to College. As a Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver, she helped start the WE Connect Campaign and Bank on California. The “Bank on” strategy that Anne conceived is being replicated in dozens of cities. She also served as a Senior Program Manager for the California Endowment, a statewide health justice philanthropic foundation.
 
Anne also authors op-eds and articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Sacramento Bee. She has advised a wide range of elected officials, financial institutions, and community organizations. Formerly, Anne worked at the Ford Foundation, and was the Associate Director of Opportunity Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution in Northern California.  She is currently a fellow at New America CA. She lives in San Francisco.

CARRIE EVANS

Carrie is the co-founder of Educators for Fair Consideration and currently works as a nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood in Oakland. From 2003-2006, Carrie was the Director of College Counseling at Eastside Prep in East Palo Alto. In this role, she was struck by the limited academic and financial opportunities that undocumented students faced in going to college. She formed E4FC with Kathy Gin in order to increase awareness of and support for undocumented youth in their academic, professional, and immigration pursuits. Carrie led E4FC’s New American Scholars Program prior to returning to graduate school to earn a Master’s degree from University of California, San Francisco and become a Family Nurse Practitioner. She has continued to advise E4FC in various capacities over the years, including most recently the Communications Strategy team and Steering Committee for the ten-year anniversary celebration.

ELENA CHÁVEZ QUEZADA

Elena is a Senior Program Officer at the Walter and Elise Haas Fund (Haas), where she manages the economic security portfolio, and is also Head of Investments at the Chávez Family Foundation (CFF). Her work at Haas supports a range of organizations across San Francisco and Alameda Counties focused on workforce development and asset-building. Elena is supporting her brother in the launch and initial grantmaking of CFF, which was started in honor of their parents and focuses on the intersection of immigration, education, and entrepreneurship. Elena is also a founding partner for the Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap Initiative; a Mayoral appointee to the San Francisco Citizen’s Committee on Community Development; a Policy Committee member of Northern California Grantmakers; and a member of several other advisory and steering committees. Elena came to the Haas Sr. Fund from Tipping Point Community, where she worked as a Senior Program Officer in supporting 12 nonprofits fighting poverty in the Bay Area. Prior to her roles in philanthropy, she managed the California expansion of Single Stop USA and worked on research and policy at the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program. Elena received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

ELISE HAAS

Elise is an advocate and funder for social justice issues, particularly those impacting the undocumented community. Her point of entry into this work was in 2012, when several other members of E4FC’s Staff and Leadership Council—Kathy Gin, UC Berkeley Chancellor Bob Birgeneau, and Meng So in particular—educated her about the unique challenges facing UC Berkeley’s undocumented students. She was honored to provide lead support in establishing UCB’s Undocumented Student Center in tribute to her father, a Cal alum with a lifelong commitment to equity and inclusion. That experience and ongoing partnership inspired her to deepen her engagement with issues affecting immigrant communities.

Elise is a member of the executive board of Define American. She also serves on the boards of the Haas, Jr. Fund and the Levi Strauss Foundation. She graduated from Stanford with a BA in Human Biology.

JOSÉ QUIÑONEZ

José is Mission Asset Fund’s (MAF) founding CEO.  Under his leadership and vision, he quickly built the organization into an award-winning nonprofit with innovative nationwide models for integrating financially excluded, low-income communities into the financial mainstream. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016 for his creativity, accomplishments, and potential as a financial services innovator.

José is a visionary leader, highly regarded in the consumer finance field. In 2014, Governor Brown enacted legislation recognizing MAF’s Lending Circles program, making California the first state to recognize credit building and lending circles as a force for good.  

José graduated from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the University of California at Davis.

JU HONG

Ju is the Program Analyst with the California Social Services Department under Immigration and Refugee Branch, developing and implementing programs and funding initiatives necessary to support legal services, outreach, community education, and other immigration integration efforts. The Branch’s initiatives include services to increase access to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Naturalization, and immigration protections for Unaccompanied Undocumented Minors (UUM).

Ju came to the United States from South Korea at the age of 11 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Laney College in Oakland, where he was elected as the first Asian American and youngest student body president. Ju graduated from Laney College and transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first undocumented student government Senator in UC Berkeley history.  

In 2013, Ju challenged the President Obama on a record number of deportations during his speech at the Betty Ong Center in San Francisco, California. His courageous action was appeared on national and international media, including CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, NPR, and BBC News.

In addition to being a member of the Leadership Council of Educators for Fair Consideration (E4FC), Ju also serves as a board member of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC).
 
Ju holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science at UC Berkeley, and a Master’s degree in Public Administration at San Francisco State University. Ju is also a certified coach through the Leadership that Works credential through the International Coach Federation.
 
Ju enjoys traveling, dancing, and playing basketball. You can follow Ju on Twitter and Instagram at @JuHong89.

JULIO NAVARRETE

Born in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, México, Julio and his family migrated to the United States in 1992. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Radio, Television, Film, and Theater from San Jose State University, and a Master of Arts in Education from The National Hispanic University.

Julio has a strong passion for participating in community service and human rights organizations. At SJSU, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Lambda leadership and honors organization, the Alpha Phi Omega community service fraternity, and the American GI Forum. After graduation, Julio worked at Downtown College Preparatory Charter High School, where he taught, motivated and mentored students from underserved communities. Julio also taught at Summit Public Schools Tahoma. Apart from his academic and professional endeavors, Julio enjoys writing, reading, exercising, and spending time with his loved ones.

Previously, Julio served as E4FC’s Arts & Creativity Manager, where he helped design Things I'll Never Say, an online platform for undocumented youth across the country to create their own immigration narratives by boldly sharing their personal experiences through various forms of creative expression.

Currently, Julio teaches Spanish, AVID, and advises the Science and Eco club at American High School.

KRSNA AVILA

Krsna is the inaugural Andy Grove Immigrants’ Rights Legal Fellow. Having immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was only four months old, Krsna grew up as an undocumented immigrant. Prior to law school, Krsna worked closely with the ILRC to establish a legal services program at Educators for Fair Consideration. As their Legal Services Manager, Krsna provided legal support to undocumented youth throughout the country.

Directly feeling the effects of our unjust immigration system, Krsna quickly became interested in attending law school in order to understand the legal system from a different lens.

While in law school, Krsna worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington D.C. and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California where he supported litigation regarding free speech and racial discrimination issues. He also participated in the Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic, where he helped represent a client before the Board of Immigration Appeals. Krsna also volunteered with the European Council on Refugees and was an editorial member for the Cornell Legal Information Institute U.S. Supreme Court Bulletin.

Krsna earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis, and his law degree from Cornell Law School where he received the 2017 Freeman Award for Civil-Human Rights for his commitment to civil rights and public service.

Read Krsna's post My Life as an Undocumented American in The Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy
View Krsna profiled in Univision’s Five Bay Area Leaders
Read Krsna’s creative writing Welcome to the United States of America
Listen to Krsna’s songs I Wanna Be a Citizen & Sky High (DREAM Act Song)
Read about Krsna profiled in The Catholic Voice
Read about Krsna profiled in The Contra Costa Times

LESLIE DOROSIN

Leslie is the co-executive director at the Grove Foundation, where she has worked since 2005. Prior to that, she was a senior manager at Intel Corporation working primarily in Finance, Venture Capital, and Human Resources. She is also Board Secretary of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugee (GCIR) and played a leadership role in GCIR’s California Immigrant Integration Initiative’s work in naturalization and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She also brings extensive experience in evaluation. She has a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA.

MATT ALEXANDER

Matt is Co-Founder of June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), a small, innovative public high school in San Francisco which was established in 2003 through a grassroots community organizing effort. JJSE serves a student body that is more than 80% low-income and nearly 30% special education students. The school’s Black and Latino students have consistently produced graduation and college success rates far exceeding local and state averages. JJSE is a school for social justice, which to us means teaching ethical values and building students’ leadership skills to create positive change in a world that is all too often defined by inequality and oppression.
 
Matt has played many roles at JJSE, including serving as the school’s principal for a decade and developing the school’s “Art of Social Justice Teaching” pedagogical framework. He is now working to expand the school’s leadership development and community organizing programs, especially around immigrant rights, gentrification, and other issues that directly impact students and families.
 
Matt holds a B.A. in history from Yale University and an M.A. in Education from the Stanford Teacher Education Program.

MENG SO

Meng is an alumnus of UC Berkeley and received his Masters in Higher Education and Organizational Change from UCLA, where he researched issues related to campus climate, educational access, and advocacy within low-income and immigrant communities of color. He currently serves as the first Director of the Undocumented Student Program at UC Berkeley, coordinating efforts to initiate and enact a comprehensive agenda that responds to the needs of first generation, low-income, and undocumented students. Thus far, the program has initiated a holistic system of critical support services for undocumented students including a Dreamers Resource Center, immigration legal support, emergency grants, mental health support, faculty/staff undocu-ally training, etc. The program has quickly emerged as a best practice of support being replicated at other universities in CA and nationwide. Today, he sits on UC Presidential Task Force on Undocumented Students, and lends his voice to national efforts to advocate for inclusive immigration policies and a federal Dream Act.

ROBERT J. BIRGENEAU

Robert is the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Professor of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University. Following time working at Yale, Oxford University and Bell Laboratories, he arrived at MIT in September 1975 as Professor of Physics. In 1988 he became head of the department and in 1991 became Dean of Science at MIT. In 2000, he became President of the University of Toronto. In 2004 he was appointed as Chancellor at UC Berkeley and joined the Physics faculty. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. He is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society and other scholarly societies. He has received many awards for teaching and for his research on the fundamental properties of materials.

SALLY KINOSHITA

Sally is the Deputy Director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC). She joined the ILRC as a Staff Attorney in 2001. In her capacity as Deputy Director, Sally helps lead a number of ILRC collaborative and capacity-building projects and oversees the organization’s marketing and communications development. Sally also brings to the ILRC her expertise on immigration relief for abused immigrant women and children as the author or co-author of a number of ILRC publications, including The VAWA Manual: Immigration Relief for Abused Immigrants; The U Visa: Obtaining Status for Immigrant Victims of Crime; Immigration Benchbook for Juvenile and Family Courts; and Living in the United States: A Guide for Immigrant Youth, and by serving as a trainer to judges, attorneys, BIA-accredited representatives, social workers, domestic violence service providers and others. Prior to joining the ILRC, Sally worked extensively with the Southeast Asian immigrant community as a Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus and as a founder of the Southeast Asian Task Force. She is conversant in Spanish.

TANYA BRODER

Tanya directs the state and local policy work at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). As a Senior Attorney, she has worked for almost 20 years to improve access to health care, education and other critical services for low-income immigrants. She writes articles and analyses, engages in administrative and legislative advocacy, co-counsels litigation, and offers technical assistance and training to legal and social service providers, government agencies, legislative staff, universities, and community-based organizations. Prior to joining NILC, she worked as a policy analyst for the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights and as a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County in Oakland. Ms. Broder is a graduate of Yale Law School.

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