2026 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Sunnie Liu
Sunnie Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and narrative strategist adding movement lawyering to the advocacy toolbox. Sunnie was born in China, grew up in Houston as the child of Chinatown workers, and called New York City home post-grad. Sunnie graduated with degrees in Studio Art and History from Yale University and is currently a Public Interest Scholar at Berkeley Law.
Most recently, Sunnie worked as a Policy Strategist at Zealous to end solitary confinement, improve public defense from Mississippi to Chicago, and organize against prisons across the US. Outside of work, Sunnie fought against the displacement of Manhattan’s Chinatown and co-founded Xin Sheng | 心声 Project, an intergenerational organization that combats mis/disinformation for the Chinese diaspora and that co-chairs the Asian American Disinformation Table. Sunnie’s award-winning political research has been recognized by the 2023 Analyst Institute Expy Award and published in the book The Politics of the Multiracial Right (NYU Press, 2026).
Working across sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, Sunnie has been an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Chautauqua Institution, Foundation House, and the Bandung Residency for Black-Asian solidarity. Sunnie was also a 2024 New Museum NEW INC Member, 2022 Justice is Global Fellow, and 2021 Yale Law School Arthur Liman Fellow in Public Interest Law.
2026 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Honorable Mention: Elijah Baucom
Elijah is a transdisciplinary educator, mentor, cultural worker, and revolutionary technologist at the intersection of technology, humanity, decolonization, and political education. He is the Director of the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic (a pro-bono, public interest cybersecurity clinic), where he teaches and trains students how to consult with and support mission-driven social sector organizations and human rights defenders.
With over 20 years of experience in Cybersecurity, IT Architecture, Education, and Management Consulting, Elijah left Corporate America to pursue working in greater alignment with his values. He became a founding member of Everyday Security, an organization and collective that provides revolutionary leadership and consulting to communities in the areas of cybersecurity, IT, business (solidarity economies) and political education.
Elijah strives to consistently challenge mainstream pedagogical approaches and unpack ways in which systematic issues impact communities and the students he teaches and mentors. He understands the indigenous wisdom of education being deeply rooted in community in an embodied manner beyond theory. Elijah’s greatest desire is to authentically connect with and co-create spaces for students and community members to feel safe, thrive, and self-actualize.
Much of his research focuses on cybersecurity, privacy (surveillance technology), technology use beyond capitalism, solidarity economies, mental health and the continued systematic impacts of colonization, imperialism, and other systems that continue to affect communities he holds dear to his heart.
2025 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Laura Díaz
Laura Díaz is the co-founder of Partners for Equity and Research at Sonoma State University, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she trains and supports undergraduate researchers engaging in community-driven environmental justice research. She is also the executive director of the Educator Collective for Environmental Justice (ECEJ) where she leads educator professional development in environmental justice curriculum development and partners with youth and community to drive environmental and climate justice action. She works to empower and support formal and informal educators to imagine and co-create environmental justice curriculum, and she has created environmental justice curriculum and lesson plans that are free for educators to use through the Puente Project and Science Friday. Having grown up in a frontline environmental justice (EJ) community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Laura’s work is centered on combating environmental injustice in partnership with members of her and other frontline communities. Laura supports community-driven research by partnering with community health workers and youth as they explore research questions whose answers can impact their community. ECEJ is committed to decolonize environmental education through student-led and student-driven workshops that flatten typically hierarchical power structures. Laura’s work with youth activists has led to multiple cohorts of students that now pursue action within their own communities. Laura is also a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Health Sciences at UC Berkeley where she studies how biomarkers of mitochondrial dysfunction can shed light on the underpinnings between exposure to social and environmental stressors on atopic disease among children in frontline environmental justice communities.
2025 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Clara Pérez Medina
Clara Pérez Medina (they/them) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley and a photographer and filmmaker whose work shines a loving light on transformative community work in the world. They blend their academic training with their cinematographic eye for the relationalities of care that make and unmake systems of domination. They grew up as a child of Venezuelan immigrants and moved four times before they graduated high school, instilling in them a deep reverence for the importance of place in identity, community, and liberatory futures and a persistent archival urge to preserve the past. As part of their dissertation work, they create community-based research films that investigate questions of memory, aesthetics, place, and belonging in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Using archival research, oral history, and photographic and film production, they examine dominant and collaboratively produced visual archives with the La Peña Cultural Center and the Archive of Urban Futures, a Black Oakland history research collective led by their mentor Dr. Brandi Summers. They work through film and photographic production as a practice of reciprocity, offering images as archival preservation of place-based memory, promotional material for up-and-coming artists and organizers, and for the material advancement of community projects through visual documentation for their community and funders. Their films also work as public pedagogical tools and organizing resources to draw attention to the visionary solutions put forth by their community partners and to showcase the beauty, rigor, and tenacity of Black and Latinx movement organizations in the Bay Area.
2024 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Stephanie Campos-Bui
Stephanie Campos-Bui was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and has lived in the Bay Area since moving to Berkeley for her undergraduate studies. She is proud to call herself a triple Golden Bear as she received both her undergraduate and law degree from UC Berkeley and has had the privilege of teaching at Berkeley Law since 2014. Stephanie is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and co-directs the Policy Advocacy Clinic where she supervises interdisciplinary teams of law and public policy students in the pursuit of non-litigation strategies to address systemic racial, economic, and social injustice. Her research and advocacy focuses largely on the disproportionate impact that fees, fines, restitution, and bail have on communities of color. Stephanie has worked in coalition with community groups across multiple states on successful fee and fine abolition campaigns in the juvenile and criminal injustice systems. In California, she represents Debt-Free Justice California. So far, they have succeeded in ending all prospective juvenile fees and relieved vulnerable youth and their families of more than $350 million in outstanding juvenile fees. At the adult level, their work led to the passage of multiple bills from 2020-23, repealing more than half of all fees and providing retroactive relief of $18.2 billion to people in the criminal legal system.
2024 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Honorable Mention: Carlos Martinez
Carlos Martinez, MPH, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and core faculty member of the Global and Community Health program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trained in public health and medical anthropology, Dr. Martinez’s research examines the health consequences and sociocultural implications of migrant policing, deportation, our fractured asylum system, environmental injustice, and the global War on Drugs. His primary research project has consisted of long-term ethnographic fieldwork examining how U.S. asylum deterrence and deportation policies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for asylum seekers and Mexican deportees. He is also involved with several community-engaged and interdisciplinary research projects in Tijuana, the Bay Area, and the Santa Cruz area focused on the health-related impacts of environmental injustice, climate change, and punitive drug policy on Latinx communities. For example, he served as Principal Investigator in the Latinx Harm Reduction Needs Assessment Project, the first study in California to identify challenges faced by Spanish- and Mayan-speaking substance users in accessing harm reduction services. Through his collaborative research with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and National Harm Reduction Coalition, Carlos led the production of “Unido/xs Contra la Sobredosis (United against Overdose),” a report that has been widely distributed among San Francisco’s city officials, public health leaders, and community organizations. His research and advocacy are aimed at promoting health and social justice among migrants, asylum seekers, deportees, substance users, and other marginalized groups.
2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: reelaviolette botts-ward
reelaviolette botts-ward is a homegirl, artist, and nontraditional community curator from Philadelphia, PA. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the REPAIR Project at UCSF, she researches Black women's healing spaces in Oakland as radical sites of health care and spiritual well-being. As founder of blackwomxnhealing, ree curates healing circles, exhibitions, courses, and research for and by Black womxn. She remains invested in making her academic work accessible to community audiences, using art, poetry, and the digital humanities as tools of translation. Her first book, mourning my inner[blackgirl]child (Nomadic Press, 2021), uses poetics as praxis to explore embodied trauma, ancestral grief work, and spiritual healing. Her work has been featured by Elle Magazine, The Griot, and the NAACP, and supported by the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, among others. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, her MA in African American Studies from UCLA, and her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. She is currently teaching The #BlackFeministHealingArts Communiversity Course in UCSF’s Medical Anthropology department.
2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Frankie Free Ramos
Frankie Free Ramos is from Yauco, Puerto Rico, spent much of her childhood in San Diego, and has lived in the Bay Area since moving to Berkeley for undergraduate studies in the 1990s. After obtaining a teaching credential and Masters in Teaching from the University of San Francisco, Dr. Ramos worked for over 10 years as a teacher and college counselor, and was a founding member of a radical small school in East Oakland. She earned a PhD from UC Berkeley in Education Leadership, Policy and Politics. Her scholarship and activism focus on teacher and community organizing, social movements, and decolonial and abolitionist praxis. She has been active in struggles for the self-determination of Puerto Rico, freedom for political prisoners and an end to privatization, neoliberalization, and austerity in education. She currently serves as the Director of Campaigns and Organizing at CURYJ (Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice), a community based organization in Oakland, CA, working to end youth incarceration and unlock the leadership of young people to dream beyond bars. Dr. Ramos is raising three children and a puppy with her partner. She enjoys spending time with them in nature, going on family trips, and laughing together.
2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Honorable Mention: Giovanni Batz
Giovanni Batz (Maya K’iche’) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2020-2022, he was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. He was also a 2018-2019 Anne Ray Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas - Austin. Batz’s research and activism focuses on extractivist industries, Guatemalan history, Maya resistance, historical Maya displacement and transnational migration from Central America to the US. He has also served as an expert witness in asylum cases. Batz is the author of La Cuarta Invasión: Historias y Resistencias del Pueblo Ixil, y la Lucha contra la Hidroeléctrica Palo Viejo en Cotzal, Quiché, Guatemala (2022). The book is open access and can be downloaded here: https://avancso.org.gt/publicaciones/proximas-publicaciones/ His other publications can be accessed here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni-Batz-2
Jason Okonofua
Nazineen Kandahari is an Afghan asylum-seeker. She is a medical student at the UCSF School of Medicine in the 
Phenocia Bauerle is the first and current director of Native American Student Development (NASD) at UC Berkeley and a citizen of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation of Montana. Prior to working at Berkeley, she served as Director of the Diversity Awareness Office at Montana State University. The first full-time staff person in her current position, she has spent the last seven years working to build support for Native American students at UC Berkeley and to bring Native issues to the center of campus priorities. Currently, she serves on the Berkeley NAGPRA committee, the Berkeley Native American Advisory Council, the UC President’s Native American Advisory Council and co-chairs the Undergraduate Outreach and Retention Working group for PNAAC. 
Boun Khamnouane was born in Phongsali, Laos. His family fled communist persecution and migrated to the United States in 1986. In 2002, he received his Bachelor of Arts in South Southeast Asian Studies from the University California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he was a co-president of LASR (Laotian American Student Representatives) and founding member of the Southeast Asian Student Coalition (SASC), the first such organization at the University of California and likely the first in the US. In addition to supporting college students, Boun and the other SASC leaders started a summer institute for Southeast Asian American high school students that continues to thrive two decades later. Boun is still actively involved with SASC, particularly with supporting and mentoring current SASC members as well as fundraising for SASC.
Bernadette (Bernie) Lim is the daughter of Filipinx-Toisan immigrants. She is a 3rd year medical student at UCSF School of Medicine and recent Masters graduate through the Joint Medical Program, a dual degree program with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Bernie seeks to re-imagine and work towards a medical and public health praxis that centers community narratives, voices, and experiences. She is the founder of the 
Will is a Black and Korean farmer and food activist in occupied Ohlone tribal territory in the East Bay. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Will's studies focused on agroecology and indigenous foodways. He graduated in December 2018 with a degree in Conservation Resource Studies in the College of Natural Resources. Within a predominantly white college, Will, with the help of others, fought for students of color to have safe spaces, specifically green spaces, where students can steward the land and reconnect with ancestral practices surrounding food and medicine. This included implementing guerilla gardens in vacant campus spaces, protecting those spaces, and engaging with other students to form a relationship with the land they are on. Will is a Farm Educator at the UC Gill Tract Community Farm and a co-founder of the 
Joel Sati is an immigrant rights activist and scholar. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate (Jurisprudence and Social Policy) at the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. candidate at Yale University. Although Sati immigrated to the U.S. from Kenya as a child, he learned of his undocumented status when he applied for college. Unable to receive the necessary financial aid to attend a four-year institution, he enrolled in community college and began working with immigrant advocacy organizations on needed reforms. Joel organized protest campaigns in Washington D.C. along with extensive canvassing efforts in Maryland’s Montgomery County, playing an integral role in helping secure passage of Maryland’s DREAM Act in 2012 as well as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Upon completing his Associate’s Degree, Joel secured a Skadden Fellowship for legal studies at the City College of New York, from which he graduated summa cum laude. During that time he was a youth organizer for African Communities Together, expanding the base of immigrant activists to include African youth. He also founded 
Rosa M. Jiménez is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco. Raised in California’s Central Valley and the daughter of Mexican working class immigrants, she completing her B.A. from UC Davis. After working for four years as a social studies/bilingual teacher in Los Angeles, she pursued and completed an M.A. in Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. in Education, both from UCLA. Based in the Central Valley and Bay Area, Rosa’s impactful community-engaged research and activist work addresses and resists deficit perspectives of Latinx immigrant communities. It asks, how can education support immigrant students to better understand their history and current political climate, take pride in their language/culture, and use education towards social change? Rosa partners with local schools and classroom Teachers of Color to design projects that support their work in teaching immigrant youth language/literacies, culturally relevant curricula, and political consciousness. At one Central Valley school, she co-designed and co-implemented curriculum about family histories of migration and documented how youth developed academic and critical literacies. Students collected their families’ migration stories, wrote them, and then analyzed them for the strengths that their families exhibited throughout their journey. Identifying these strengths plays an important role in helping youth to identify their own strengths and counter the dominant racist and anti-immigrant narratives so prevalent in news cycles. When youth are able to view their lived experiences as transnational migrants through critical perspectives, it generates spaces of healing, possibility and transformation. Her work also challenges and transforms the dominant pedagogy and practices of teachers and administrators who work with these youth, helping them to better understand students’ and families’ “experiential migration capital,” which she defines as “the knowledges, sensibilities, and skills cultivated through the array of migration experiences to the U.S. or its borderlands.”
Lauren Heidbrink is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at California State University Long Beach. Trained as an anthropologist, Lauren’s work challenges legal and political ambiguities and provides advocacy for unaccompanied migrant children. Moving between academic, political and social worlds, Lauren has engaged in sustained ethnographic engagement with immigrant communities. Her research with young migrants in U.S. immigration detention and following deportation to Central America challenges xenophobic stereotypes of youth as vulnerable victims, delinquents, or gang members, revealing contextualized understandings of how and why young people are on the move. In addition to sharing this research with policymakers at the U.S. Department of State and USAID, she uses multi-media methods – blogs, podcasts, photo journals, digital stories – that youth collaboratively develop to ensure that youth reach wider and more diverse publics with their ideas, experiences, and expertise. Her collaborative website, 
Elizabeth Clark-Rubio is an immigrant rights activist and ethnographic researcher. Currently a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, she has organized teach-ins, direct actions, and ally trainings for faculty and staff in support of undocumented students. Her organizing has brought attention to the large number of AAPI undocumented students at UCI and helped to build collective power between on- and off-campus communities. She has also secured more resources for undocumented students at UCI; opened up spaces on campus for dialogue, education and strategizing around issues affecting undocumented students and immigrant communities; and participated in vigils and rallies in D.C. calling for a “clean” Dream Act. Her scholarship is directed at gathering, amplifying and organizing undocumented student stories into a platform for social justice and moving academics to engage in overt political action for collective struggle. Prior to graduate studies, Liz organized with undocumented Latinx immigrants affiliated with CASA de Maryland, a community immigrant rights organization in the Washington D.C. area. In 2013 she founded Yo Decido, an organization that combines legal, psychosocial and popular education services into a holistic care model for undocumented Latina women who are also survivors of domestic violence.
Camila Cribb Fabersunne is a resident in UCSF’s Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) Program. Her work seeks to combat the school-to-prison pipeline by applying a public health lens. Dedicated to dismantling mechanisms of structural racism affecting children and families, Camila regularly convenes diverse stakeholders – from the school district, community organizations, social justice organizations, county Department of Public Health, and academics – to focus on the physical and mental health predictors of school suspension. School discipline policies have been connected with increased risk of defiant behaviors, poor school achievement, and likely increased rates of incarceration especially among students of color. By supplying the data and bringing together partners who historically have not worked together on this issue, Camila is leading a paradigm shift toward considering educational discipline and educational outcomes as public health issues.
Aileen Suzara is a land- and kitchen-based educator with roots in the environmental justice and community health movements. An alumna of UC Berkeley's Masters in Public Health Nutrition, she is passionate about helping young people grow as ecologically-minded, culturally-literate leaders in the Good Food Movement. In 2014-15 Aileen was a graduate student researcher at the Berkeley Food Institute and took a leadership role in their community engagement program, which aims to build bridges between UC Berkeley and the broader food and agriculture community. Outside the university, Aileen’s social change efforts of the last decade focused on building health among Bay Area communities of color. As a public health nutritionist, she delves into health inequities faced by Filipino Americans, including diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Collaborating with 
Sandra Brown is a scholar and activist for farmworker rights and food justice. She is Assistant Professor and Faculty Director of the Master of Public Affairs Program at the University of San Francisco; she teaches classes on food policy, non-profits, and social change, among other topics, and conducts research on fair trade, environmental toxins, and farmworker rights. She received her PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2012, writing her dissertation on fair trade in the banana industry in Ecuador. Sandra’s academic focus stems from her deep and sustained commitment to social justice. In the 1990’s, she helped organize farmworkers in the Monterey area and coordinated community support for the United Farm Workers strawberry campaign. Since then, she has been a dedicated advocate for workers in California and South America, including campaigning for living wages in the Bay Area and working with farmworker cooperatives and unions in Ecuador and Colombia to coordinate public actions, write funding grants for community development projects, and draw public attention to appalling labor conditions. She regularly speaks to community and professional organizations to share her work and advocate for better working conditions, and she serves on the boards of the Cal Ag Roots Project, the California Food and Justice Coalition, the California Institute for Rural Studies, and the Agricultural Justice Project.
Sarah Ramirez, PhD, MPH, MA, is a health educator for the city of Pixley, California, a lecturer in the Food Nutrition and Science Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a principal investigator at the Public Health institute in Oakland. She is also the co-founder of BeHealthyTulare, a grass-roots collective in Tulare County that incorporates popular education and participatory strategies to create an environment that makes equitable health possible for everyone. The daughter of Mexican farm workers, Sarah and her siblings witnessed her parents, other family members, and friends work long hours in the fields and suffer from chronic illnesses which often resulted in premature death and chronic suffering. Sarah herself spent time experiencing fieldwork. While working on her PhD and just after completing her MPH in epidemiology Sarah returned to Pixley to apply her knowledge of health of her community as the county epidemiologist and began to find the evidence for the disturbing geographic and race/ethnic disparities. Working as a health educator, academic researcher, and community health advocate, Sarah has a passion for creating healthy communities and educating others about the patterns and predicaments of health disparities particularly as they are experienced in rural areas, among immigrant and migrant populations. At night Sarah prepares her courses, analyzes public health data, and devises workshop presentations about health disparities. During the day, she spends part of her week as a lecturer teaching undergraduates about the realities of working on nutrition related topics within the community. She has worked as an epidemiologist and a health educator providing Spanish-language health classes and holding workshops/support groups on topics related to chronic disease prevention, Through BeHealthyTulare she continues these activities along with working in their local community garden and teaching hands-on culinary education, and leading group fitness classes. BeHealthyTulare also recruits volunteers to harvest thousands of pounds (YTD 24,178lbs) of unwanted fruits and vegetables per year from farms and backyards, which are then donated to local food pantries that serve low income populations in Tulare County. BeHealthyTulare also offers local Latino youth a space to practice their leadership and compassion while 
Mimi Kim, MSW, is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare and a Graduate Fellow at ISSI. She is also Founder and Executive Director of 
Margaret Rhee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies (with a designated emphasis in New Media Studies) at the University of California, Berkeley. She co-leads (with Isela González) From the Center (FTC), a collaboration of health educators, academics, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women who work in partnership to re-imagine education, research, and advocacy through the power of digital storytelling. After serving as project manager of the community-based participatory action research project “Jailed Women and HIV Education,” Margaret conceived of and developed a curriculum for FTC’s HIV/AIDS prevention education digital storytelling project, which provides incarcerated women with a creative venue through which to share their expertise and knowledge with academic and countless other communities. In the fall of 2010, Margaret co-led workshops in creative writing, HIV education, and digital storytelling. These workshops were held in the San Francisco county jail and provided incarcerated women with the opportunity to learn about HIV/AIDS and to use low-cost production technologies to create their own digital stories highlighting how their lives have been impacted by HIV/AIDS. Upon completion of the digital stories, the FTC participants asked that their stories be shared in academic settings, community settings and with anyone serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. Screenings of the FTC digital stories have been held in San Francisco jails for incarcerated women, Sheriff’s Department staff, Jail Health Services staff and other jail service providers. The Forensic AIDS Project (the first HIV service provider in a California jail/prison) continues to build on the FTC’s work by using the stories as educational tools with incarcerated populations, HIV prevention educators and academic partners. These stories are also accessible world-wide on the FTC website (ourstorysf.org). After viewing the stories there is a significant increase in HIV tests requested by prisoners. Incarcerated women who view these stories have expressed that FTC’s work has changed how they view educational institutions; they see the value in sharing their knowledge and expertise with academics. 
Genevieve Negron-Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies Program of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. A second-generation Chicana who grew up in California just miles from the US-Mexico border, Genevieve began her activist career at the age of 15, organizing members of her community for immigrant rights. A first-generation college student, Genevieve has been involved in numerous organizations that advocate for politically and economically marginalized communities both on and off campus. Genevieve spent two years as co-Director of the 
Catalina Garzón is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Catalina has dedicated herself to building bridges between the university and communities facing environmental and economic injustices. In her academic work, Catalina develops community-led social action research models that emphasize equity and power-sharing between grassroots groups and researchers. As a UC Berkeley undergrad, Catalina was co-chair of Nindakin: People of Color for Environmental Justice, a statewide advocacy group for communities facing environmental injustices. In 1999 Catalina also worked with PODER, an environmental justice group based in San Francisco's Mission District, to develop a student solidarity campaign at UC Berkeley for Fuerza Unida, a group of former Levi's garment workers in Texas organizing for workers rights and corporate accountability. After graduation, Catalina was selected as a fellow in the Bay Area Communities Initiative and placed at the Land Restoration and Community Revitalization Project at the Urban Habitat Program, where she engaged in policy advocacy efforts to advance community-driven brownfields redevelopment. In 2001 Catalina returned to UC Berkeley to pursue a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning, focusing her master’s thesis on providing a community-friendly guide to the brownfields redevelopment process in West Oakland. Selected to be a fellow in the Sustainable Communities Leadership Program, Catalina worked with an Oakland-based nonprofit research institute (Pacific Institute) to develop and implement a series of trainings on refinery flaring and open space preservation with community leaders and activists in Richmond and North Richmond. In 2003 Catalina began her doctoral studies. Two years later she traveled to the nation of Colombia as a Human Rights Center Fellow to provide research support to the U'Wa Defense Project, an indigenous rights organization working to protect U'Wa land and communities from oil extraction. Currently, Catalina is writing a dissertation on participatory research collaborations between researchers and community groups in the environmental justice movement in the Bay Area. She continues to work part-time at the Pacific Institute, developing and facilitating popular education trainings and community-based planning projects with environmental justice groups in the Bay Area and beyond.
Loan Dao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1975, Loan and her family came to the U.S. as refugees from the American war in Vietnam. From an early age she was involved in creating social networks and locally-based organizations that provided sites of healing and support for Southeast Asian (SEA) communities. During college, Loan volunteered as the prisoner’s liaison for the ACLU in Central Texas, documenting prison conditions, answering letters from inmates and bringing potential cases to lawyers’ attention. After college, Loan worked as the Director of Huong Viet Community Center in Oakland, where she recruited local college students to mentor high school youth and assist in the development of research and programs. Now in graduate school, Loan’s dissertation research looks at social movements among Southeast Asian youth challenging the detention and deportation of SEAs in the U.S. Between 2002-06 she used her academic expertise to help connect college, community, legal and policy organizations to form a multi-pronged response to the detention and deportation crisis affecting Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugee communities. She helped form the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, which was the first national network of organizations to specifically address post-9/11 detentions and deportation practices in the U.S., and she has assisted numerous SEA families facing deportation in her role as researcher, expert witness and legal advocate. In addition to her advocacy and scholarship on detention and deportation issues, Loan has been active in providing disaster relief to the large Vietnamese population affected by hurricane Katrina. She co-founded “VietBAK” (Vietnamese Bay Area Katrina relief group) and she has made frequent trips to the Gulf Coast to help with rebuilding and relief efforts, provide translation, and advocate for more resources for Vietnamese communities along the Gulf Coast. She recently completed co-producing a full-length documentary titled “A Village Called Versailles.” Versailles, a community in eastern New Orleans, was first settled by Vietnamese refugees and later ravaged by hurricane Katrina. The film recounts the empowering story of how people who have already suffered so much in their lifetime, turn a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change and a chance for a better future.