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Affordable Housing Project |
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CRLAF’s Affordable Housing Project focuses on statewide housing policy and its affect on low-income households, seniors, farmworkers and others in need of affordable housing. The Project provides technical assistance and education on housing policy to legal services attorneys, housing developers and others to ensure that they are aware of the most recent changes to the law, and to gather first-hand feedback on what works and what is broken in California's housing regulatory environment. For example, in the fall, CRLAF coordinates regional meetings in Northern and Southern California among housing providers, legal services programs and other housing professionals to review recent developments in the law. The Project also provides advice and assistance to local legal services attorneys working to solve housing problems for their clients, to help craft solutions that protect and expand the supply of affordable housing.
Brian Augusta, Esq., Project Director
Brian Augusta, Director, Housing Project Brian is a staff attorney and legislative advocate with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, where he focuses on statewide land use and affordable housing policy. Brian began working on affordable housing issues in 1991, as the director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance, a position he held for four years. In 1999, after graduating from Santa Clara University School of Law, Brian joined the staff of Legal Services of Northern California, where he worked for six years as a staff attorney. During his tenure with LSNC, Brian's worked focused on land use and housing element litigation and advocacy. Among other contributions, Brian’s advocacy helped win adoption of inclusionary housing policies in Folsom, Sacramento County and the City of Sacramento. The most recent effort, a two-year campaign to win passage of the policy in the County of Sacramento, resulted in the only known ordinance to include extremely low income households, those making less than 30% of the median income. Just prior to working with CRLAF, he served two years as staff to Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-San Jose), most recently as her Legislative Director. He currently serves as on the board of the Sacramento Housing Alliance and the California Institute for Rural Studies. |
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Labor and Civil Rights Litigation |
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Labor and Civil Rights Litigation |
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Protecting Children of Immigrant Parents |
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This project will provide high quality legal services and legal education at no cost to parents and community members. The goal is to protect parental rights and to reduce the traumatization of children whose parents are, without warning, taken away by immigration, detained and possibly deported. With the leadership of Eliana and guidance and supervision of CRLAF's Executive Director, Amagda Perez, the project will provide a much-needed service to immigrant families in rural poor communities in six counties in California 's North Central Valley. Eliana will help parents understand their rights and legal options; help them develop plans for the care of their children (both U.S. citizen and undocumented) in the event the parents and other family members are detained or deported; and draw up legal documents, (e.g., for custody and guardianship), for those parents who choose to express their wishes for children's ongoing care in the U.S. and preserve custody for their children.
Eliana Kaimowitz Rodriguez, Esq., Project Director and Equal Justice Fellow 2010-2011
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Immigration and Citizenship |
CRLAF’s Immigration Project provides select pro bono representation for immigrants appearing before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and in federal court; technical assistance and training to IOLTA direct service providers; and community education and training on select immigration law topics. Since the Project’s inception, CRLAF staff and volunteer attorneys and law students have assisted thousands of individuals in applying for naturalization throughout California’s Central Valley. In the last few years, the Immigration Project has provided pro bono representation to immigrant victims of crime residing throughout the Sacramento Valley in seeking to legalize immigration status and be reunited with family members. Additionally, the Immigration Project maintains a hotline for individuals facing imminent removal as a result of a raid.
Erin L. Hernández, Immigration Project.
Erin is CRLAF’s Immigration Project Director and a staff attorney for CRLAF’s Litigation Unit, has been with CRLAF since 2008. She is admitted to practice law in California and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Erin provides technical assistance and training to immigration legal service providers throughout the Sacramento Valley. She provides select legal representation before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and in federal court. Erin speaks Spanish.
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Agricultural Worker Health |
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Since 2002, CRLAF's Agricultural Worker Health Project has combined community outreach, leadership development, and policy and legal advocacy to help immigrant and farm worker communities improve their health and safety throughout the Central Valley and in rural, isolated, and poor communities elsewhere in the state. We seek to improve the health of farmworker communities by advocating to improve working conditions in the agricultural industry. We also represent workers in impact litigation and file amicus briefs in select cases.
Julia L. Montgomery, Esq., Project Director
Julia Montgomery is an attorney and the Agricultural Worker Health Project Director for CRLA Foundation. She has held that position since 2002, and previously worked as a staff attorney and Directing Attorney in various field offices for California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. Ms. Montgomery is a bilingual, Spanish-speaking attorney who specializes in representing low-wage immigrant workers. She has advocated for farmworker rights for over a decade before administrative agencies, state court and federal court. Her advocacy during the past several years alone has helped return nearly $2 million dollars in unpaid wages to farmworkers. She has also served as lead counsel on several complex lawsuits that achieved significant improvements in workplace and housing conditions, including cases involving sexual harassment and unlawful discrimination. She has also taught as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law. Ms. Montgomery is a 1996 graduate of the University of California, Davis School of Law and holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Berkeley. |
The Education Project provides technical assistance, advocacy support, and training to legal service projects, elementary and secondary educational institutions, other public entities, and low income individuals statewide. The Education Project engages in federal, state, and local legislative and administrative advocacy on education issues, with an emphasis on policies dealing with immigrant and migrant education, English language learners, and parental involvement. We also participate in a number of statewide taskforces relating to educational policy and provide technical assistance, advocacy support and training to parents, elementary and secondary educational institutions.
Santiago Avila-Gómez, Project Director
Santiago is a staff attorney in the Sacramento office of the California Rural Legal Assistance (“CRLA”) Foundation a nonprofit organization that provides community education, public policy advocacy, training, and technical and legal assistance to California’s rural poor. Santiago practices immigration law and engages in state legislative and regulatory advocacy relating to immigration, and elementary and secondary education. Santiago received his J.D. from the King Hall School of Law at University of California, Davis, and earned his undergraduate degree from San Jose State University.
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Pesticide and Work Safety |
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The Pesticide and Work Safety Project works to bring to light and reduce agricultural work hazards and pesticide exposures faced by California’s agricultural workers and other rural residents. The project maintains a dialog with OSHA and local, state and federal pesticide regulatory officials to encourage more thorough investigations and stricter enforcement of existing laws and regulations and increased use of safer and more sustainable pest control alternatives. The project also provides technical assistance to legal services programs and community organizations on developing outreach materials, accessing and understanding pesticide and work safety laws and regulations and public records and responding to pesticide poisoning incidents. We collaborate with members of other non-profit organizations to educate policy makers, agency officials and the public about heat stress, pesticide exposure and other work and environmental health and safety hazards affecting California’s farmworkers and other rural poor. We recently produced a pesticide exposure prevention and response video for farmworkers which focuses on workers rights.
Anne Katten, Pesticide and Work Safety Project Director.
Anne has worked with CRLAF for the past 19 years conducting oversight on Cal-OSHA and county, state and federal pesticide regulatory programs, reviewing pesticide illness episode investigations, advocating for improved enforcement and policy changes to reduce exposure of farmworkers to pesticides and other work hazards. She has been involved in Cal-OSHA advisory committees on hand-weeding, heat stress, ergonomics, tractor and ladder safety and numerous state and federal level stakeholder meeting on development of pesticide regulations. Anne has extensive experience collaborating with labor, environmental and community organizations and was a co-author of the Californians for Pesticide Reform reports Fields of Poison and Second Hand Pesticides: Airborne Pesticide Drift in California. She is an industrial hygienist with a Masters in Public Health.
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Sustainable Rural Communities |
As the newest project at CRLAF, the Sustainable Rural Communities Project attempts to merge many of our organization’s longstanding direct services and advocacy issues into an approach that attacks the m
ore systemic causes of our communities’ poverty, poor health and degraded environments. The Project works toward the creation of a more sustainable food system and participatory governance for people in all communities, but especially disenfranchised or historically marginalized communities. Our advocates work to craft systemic solutions for farm-worker access to decent housing, affordable transportation, living wages, safe working conditions, and to strengthen communities’ access to clean, affordable and reliable drinking water and wastewater systems and opportunities for economic viability. Addressing the needs of disadvantaged unincorporated communities is a critical priority for the Sustainable Rural Communities Project. In 2008, CRLAF partnered with CRLA, Inc and PolicyLink for the Community Equity Initiative that attempts to address the unique needs of these communities. The Project recently brought together community-based organizations from rural communities across the state to improve how rural areas are planning for transit and investing in transit, including farmworker vanpools. In 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger signed SB 716 (Wolk), which amends the Transportation Development Act for the first time since its enactment in 1972.
Martha Guzman-Aceves, Project Director, Sustainable Communities Project Martha has been at CRLA Foundation for over five years. Her current advocacy work has concentrated on environmental justice, occupational health and environmental hazards like heat illness and pesticide exposure. In 2003, she served as the Legislative Coordinator for the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO covering a range of labor and environmental issues. She is currently an active member of the following organizations: the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, where she concentrates on attaining safe and affordable drinking water and wastewater for rural communities; the Ag Innovations Network, which strives to bring food and food production back to the core of people’s lives; Pesticide Action Network North America; and the Sierra Institute. She has a M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis and a B.S. in International Economics from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
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CRLAF Projects