Arcelia was raised in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas by Mexican immigrant parents. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Her legal career has been devoted to providing legal representation to those who would not otherwise have access to it.

Immediately prior to joining NCLR, she served as the Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, a national women’s rights advocacy organization. She has also worked with numerous community-based organizations to secure the rights of working class and indigent people in the fields of employment, housing, criminal defense, and immigration. As a trial lawyer, she has litigated over a dozen jury trials representing juveniles and adults accused of misdemeanors and felonies. As an appellate lawyer, she has represented people on death row. She has argued cases before numerous courts including the California Supreme Court. In 2012, San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu appointed her to the Board of Appeals, a quasi-judicial 5-person body that hears appeals relating to a wide range of City determinations.

Arcelia has also devoted a substantial portion of her time to community service serving on the boards of various professional and non-profit organizations such as Women Defenders, San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association, Our Family Coalition, and Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, among others. Arcelia is the founder of the Women Defenders Fellowship which supports law students pursuing careers in indigent criminal defense. She has also taught Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at several Bay Area law schools. In 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle named her a “Bay Area Changemaker.”

Arcelia is a frequent speaker at the national level on civil rights issues and women’s rights in particular. She writes for the Huffington Post and has published several articles on race/ethnicity, education, and feminist theory. She lives in San Francisco with her spouse and their two sons.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights, founded in 1977, is a national legal organization committed to advancing the civil and human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families through litigation, public policy advocacy and public education.

Vincent Pan is a progressive leader on issues of racial justice and social change.

The requirements of leadership, in Vincent’s view, demand not only running effective organizations and campaigns, but also working across boundaries to make the whole of social justice efforts greater than the sum of its component parts. Whether reforming immigration laws or fixing the criminal justice system, promoting language access or increasing civic participation, Vincent believes campaigns must be aggressive and visible, while also connecting people with shared values such as compassion, inclusion and equity. To create a world that works for everyone, Vincent advocates a holistic approach that simultaneously changes laws as well as hearts and minds.

Prior to joining Chinese for Affirmative Action in 2006, Vincent was a consultant to the William J. Clinton Foundation, where he helped start treatment programs for children living with HIV/AIDS in China. Before that he co-founded and directed Heads Up, a nonprofit organization that runs after-school and summer programs for low-income children in Washington, D.C. Vincent’s work with Heads Up was profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other publications. He is a former winner of the Do Something Brick Award for community leadership and has been a fellow with the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University, the Echoing Green Foundation and the Stride Rite Foundation.

Chinese for Affirmative Action was founded in 1969 to protect the civil and political rights of Chinese Americans and to advance multiracial democracy in the United States. CAA is a progressive voice in and on behalf of the broader Asian and Pacific American community, advocating for systemic change that protects immigrant rights, promotes language diversity and remedies racial injustice.

Chris Punongbayan doesn’t want to be your mentor. He wants to be your comrade.

It’s a leadership style Chris learned shortly after college from the executive director of the Audre Lorde Project, Joo-Hyun Kang, who invited Chris to sit on her board. When Chris expressed his gratitude using the ‘m’ word, Joo-Hyun replied, “I’m not your mentor. We are comrades.”

Those simple words made Chris feel that despite his youth, his contributions were highly and equally valued. Now, more than a decade later, he believes that it is his responsibility to bring new voices into the social justice movement, learn from them, and build ownership with them.

Chris has been involved in grassroots activism in the Asian American, immigrant worker and LGBT communities on both coasts of the country, and his vision of social justice is grounded in the realities of those communities.

After graduating from Brown University and UCLA Law School, Chris worked as a Ford Foundation New Voices Fellow with Filipino Advocates for Justice in Oakland, before joining the Positive Resource Center in San Francisco as a staff attorney, representing clients living with disabilities. From 2006-08 Chris also served as Vice-Chair of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, based in San Francisco, is the nation’s oldest organization advocating for the civil and legal rights of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Its mission is to promote, advance and represent the legal and civil rights of these communities, with a focus on addressing the needs of low-income, immigrant and underserved individuals. In addition to supporting clients with legal expertise, the Caucus seeks to bring together elements of policy advocacy and community organizing so that through one person’s individual struggle it is able to achieve broader results for the community.

Abdi Soltani represents a new generation of public interest leaders in California. Having worked his entire career in Northern California, he understands its diverse communities, geographic idiosyncrasies, political dynamics, ideological fault lines and key players.

A card-carrying member of the ACLU for many years, Abdi became executive director of the Northern California affiliate in 2009. Previously, he served as executive director at Californians for Justice, the Campaign for College Opportunity and PARSA Community Foundation.

Abdi’s passion for freedom of speech and constitutional protections is intensely personal as well as political. As a child in Iran, his early experiences were shaped by government abuse of power before and after the Iranian Revolution.

Abdi has extensive experience leading social justice campaigns related to statewide policy and ballot initiatives. As a leader in the “No on 54” campaign in 2003, he helped defeat a proposition that would weaken racial equality by barring state and local government agencies from collecting vital data on Californians’ race, ethnicity, color or national origin.

Abdi was awarded the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship in 1995 and the Gerbode Foundation Fellowship in 2002. He serves on the board of Public Advocates, a legal advocacy organization and is a graduate of Stanford University.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is the country’s largest ACLU affiliate. In 2009, it celebrated its 75th anniversary as a leader in defending and advancing the civil rights and civil liberties of all Californians.

Kimberly Thomas Rapp is working to build an organization and a movement that never sits on its laurels. The key to success, she believes, is agility and constant self-improvement.

In collaboration with Lawyers’ Committee staff, board members and constituent communities, Kimberly has worked to continue to broaden the scope and relevance of her organization’s triple-barreled work as direct service providers, impact litigators and advocates in the areas of racial, economic and immigrant justice.

Kimberly considers herself uniquely positioned to ‘hold the tension’ between LCCR’s non-profit staff, constituents and corporate pro bono attorneys because of her experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors.

She served as Lead Deputy Counsel for the County of Santa Clara, and as legal counsel to the Santa Clara County Office of Education and various school districts. Before her public service, Kimberly was the Director of Law and Public Policy for the Equal Justice Society. Before and after law school, she worked in the private sector, conducting investigations and trainings on workplace discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual harassment, and issues of hours and wages.

Throughout her career, Kimberly has been motivated by her grandparents, who grew up picking cotton in Texas and encouraged her to take advantage of every opportunity that came her way, from undergraduate studies at Berkeley, to Stanford Law School, to work in the private, public and non-profit sectors. “To this day, it almost brings me to tears to think of my grandmother signing her name,” says Kimberly. “It was a concentrated, laborious effort. The barriers that existed for her, they still exist to varying degrees today.”

Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in 1968, works to advance, protect and promote the legal rights of communities of color, and low-income persons, immigrants, and refugees. Assisted by hundreds of pro bono attorneys, Lawyers’ Committee provides free legal assistance and representation to individuals on civil legal matters through direct services, impact litigation and policy advocacy.