PUBLIC POLICY & CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Dr. Elisha Smith Arrillaga serves as the executive director of The Education Trust-West, a research and advocacy organization focused on educational justice and supporting the high achievement of all California students, with a particular focus on underserved students of color, low-income students and English learners. Dr. Smith Arrillaga leads the organization’s work centering education as a key racial and economic justice issue and has extensive expertise in leading initiatives using multiple strategies for impacting state policy—leveraging direct action, research, media, and policymaker engagement. She has more than twenty years’ experience working in and partnering with education and workforce policy, research, and advocacy organizations, including the Career Ladders Project, First 5 LA, College Bound, the Hewlett Foundation, Mathematica Policy Research and high schools and community colleges across California. Dr. Smith Arrillaga holds a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton. She is the proud mother of a rising kindergartener.

Cathy Cha
President, Haas Jr. Fund

Rev. Ben McBride
Co-Director, PICO California

Ben is a native of San Francisco, spiritual leader and longtime activist for peace and justice in the Bay Area. In 2008, he relocated his family to a difficult neighborhood in Oakland called the “Kill Zone” to understand and respond to the epidemic of gun violence, firsthand. During this tenure, he was an instrumental leader of relaunching Oakland’s first successful iteration of Operation Ceasefire, a data-driven, violence reduction strategy, contributing heavily to a 50% reduction in homicides over five years.

Ben serves as a national leader around reconstructing public safety systems and gun violence prevention work, including a background of training over 100 law enforcement departments and executives. Ben joined PICO California, the largest grassroots community organization in the state, representing 450,000 people across 73 cities, in 2015 and serves as the Co-Director. Ben founded the Bring the HEAT campaign, a peacemaking initiative to address police violence, and serves as the Co-Chair of California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board focusing on ending racial profiling in California. Ben was featured in the Sundance Film Festival Award winning film, THE FORCE, focusing on his peacemaking work. Ben is also an experienced trainer around equity, diversity and inclusion; working with companies and values based organizations across the country. 

Ben and his wife Gynelle have been married for 20 years and have 3 amazing daughters. They reside in Oakland, CA.

Thomas A. Saenz
President and General Counsel, MALDEF

Thomas Saenz is President and General Counsel of MALDEF; he leads the organization in pursuing litigation, policy advocacy, and community education to promote the civil rights of all Latinos living in the United States in the areas of education, employment, immigrants’ rights, and voting rights. Saenz rejoined MALDEF in August 2009, after four years on Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's executive team.  He previously spent 12 years at MALDEF practicing civil rights law, including four years as litigation director. He has served as lead counsel for MALDEF in numerous cases, including challenges to California Proposition 187, California Proposition 227, and California congressional redistricting. In 2016, Saenz argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Texas, representing intervenors defending Obama Administration deferred action initiatives. Saenz graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School; he clerked for two federal judges before initially joining MALDEF in 1993.

Jonathan Mehta Stein
Executive Director, Common Cause

Jonathan Mehta Stein is the Executive Director of California Common Cause, a nonprofit advocacy organization that works on voting rights, redistricting, and money in politics reform to build a better California democracy. Jonathan was previously the head of the Voting Rights & Census Program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, where he worked to increase access to California’s democracy for historically disenfranchised communities, including immigrant and limited-English speaking voters. Previous to that, Jonathan worked as a voting rights staff attorney for the ACLU of California.

Brittany Stonesifer 
Voting Rights Attorney, ACLU of California

Brittany Stonesifer is a Voting Rights Attorney at the ACLU of California, where she advocates to expand the franchise to all Californians and to reduce barriers to voting caused by the registration process. Since joining the ACLU in 2019, Brittany has fought with a grassroots coalition to restore voting rights to people with criminal convictions, utilizing her prior expertise in reforming criminal justice policy.