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Staff

Staff Biographies

Gustavo Aguirre

Gustavo Aguirre was born in Guanajuato, Mexico and immigrated to California at the age of 19, where he worked under a United Farm Workers’ union contract as a lemon harvester for 16 years. During his tenure at the company, he served as a steward and as the leader of the UFW worker committee involved in their contract negotiations and administration at his ranch.  As a worker leader, Aguirre volunteered for many union boycott and political campaigns. In 1986, he helped organize support for the last federal immigration reform law that provided amnesty to undocumented residents. He helped mobilize farm workers to walk precincts in Los Angeles during the 1992 and 1996 campaigns that elected Bill Clinton president, and the 1998 drive that elected Gray Davis Governor, as well as working for numerous other pro-union legislators.

Aguirre started working full time with the UFW in 1996 as an organizer in the union's strawberry organizing effort.  He quickly was named Regional Director in charge of UFW field operations in Southern California, and in June 2003 moved to Delano as the Regional Director of the San Joaquin Valley in Central California.  At the UFW convention in 2000, Aguirre was elected National Vice President, serving until May 2006.  He has negotiated and administered collective bargaining agreements and been involved in numerous organizing drives, promoting and developing staff and volunteer leaders, and taking care of all union business in his region.  As Regional Director and and Executive Board member as National Vice President, Aguirre had the opportunity to be part of the top UFW leadership team including Arturo Rodriguez and Dolores Huerta.

After his 10 years of service to the UFW, in June 2006 Aguirre joined the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment as Assistant Director of Organizing, focusing on pesticides and other environmental issues to protect the health of all communities.

Liza Bolaños

Liza Bolaños is originally from Visalia, California. She graduated from California State University, Fresno, and was accepted into the California Latino Legislative Caucus Institute for Public Policy, Senator Richard G. Polanco Fellowship. During the fellowship, she had the opportunity to work in both the Executive and Legislative branches of government in Sacramento, California.

Although, building on her student activism at CSUF, Bolaños’s entry into the environmental field and clean air issues was a logical progression from her University days and Sacramento experiences, her career almost took a different turn.  As a student intern, Bolaños increased student participation in statewide lobbying and grassroots efforts, and conducted strategic campaign planning and events coordination. Along the way she published articles on CSU student activities in local newspapers as well as student publications, all the while maintaining two jobs to support herself while attending the University. Upon graduation, at the urging of a mentor professor, she applied for a Sacramento Fellowship, in spite of the fact that no CSU graduate had ever been selected. She was making plans to re-enter the Central Valley job market when word came that she would be spending a year in Sacramento as the 2005-2006 recipient of the Richard G. Polanco Fellowship. The skills she acquired during her fellowship and her experiences in Sacramento prepared her for the newly created role of CVAQ Coordinator.

Bolaños happily returns to the Central Valley in hopes of contributing to the sustainable growth and sensible progress of the Central Valley communities. When not working she enjoys spending time with her parents, six brothers and sisters, and her ten beautiful nieces and nephews.

Ingrid Brostrom

Ingrid Brostrom, a graduate of the University of California-Hastings College of the Law, joins CRPE’s Delano office as an Equal Justice Works Fellow.  Her fellowship project, “Don’t Waste the Valley,” focuses on waste issues facing the Central Valley ranging from hazardous waste facility expansion to biosolid application on agricultural lands.  Before joining CRPE, Ingrid worked primarily on wildlife and land conservation issues.  She graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with degrees in environmental studies and politics and interned with the Jane Goodall Institute, the Center on Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club.  She was an articles editor for the West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy and published a piece on protecting culturally significant wildlife using the National Historic Preservation Act.  Her focus shifted toward environmental justice after interning with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment during her final summer in law school.  When not working, Ingrid enjoys traveling and learning about foreign cultures.  She also considers herself a rugby player for life.

Luke Cole on the Chukchi Sea with Kivalina IRA Council President Jerry Norton and Jared Norton.

Luke Cole
Executive Director
San Francisco

Luke Cole was one of this nation’s most important and innovative environmental attorneys.  He co-founded the Center with Ralph Abascal in 1989 and grew the Center with his own style of ‘from the heart’ management for 20 years.  As reported by Turkana on the Daily Kos blog, Luke’s successful, pioneering work, taking on the California dairy industry, made him the cover boy of the February, 2002 issue of California Law Magazine, in an article entitled: Got Manuer?  How Environmental Lawyer Luke Cole Brought the Dairy Construction in the San Joaquin Valley to a Standstill. Cole was been instrumental in halting the proliferation of mega-dairy farms in California’s Central Valley, and a key player in forcing local jurisdictions in California to study dairies’ environmental impacts and mitigate them.

He represented  low-income communities and workers throughout California who are fighting environmental hazards, stressing the need for community-based, community-led organizing and litigation. Through the Center, he also provided legal and technical assistance to attorneys and community groups involved in environmental justice struggles nationwide.

Cole worked with dozens of community groups in local struggles across the United States. He represented Kettleman City residents in their successful efforts to stop Chemical Waste Management from building California’s first toxic waste incinerator in their community. His current cases include representing residents of the Inupiaq Village of Kivalina in northwest Alaska in a suit against the world’s largest zinc and lead mine, which has polluted the village’s water supply for years. Other recent cases included representing South Camden Citizens in Action of Camden, NJ, in a historic civil rights suit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection; the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe of Death Valley in its efforts to halt open-pit cyanide heap leach gold mining in sacred ancestral lands; Desert Citizens Against Pollution in the group’s successful challenge to tire burning in several cement kilns; and Communities for a Better Environment in a civil rights challenge to California pollution-trading regulations. Cole was appointed by EPA Administrator Carol Browner to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), where he served from 1996 through 2000 (including chairing NEJAC’s Enforcement Subcommittee from 1998 through 2000). He also served as a member of EPA’s Title VI Implementation Committee.

In 1997, the American Lawyer magazine named Cole to the Public Sector 45, one of “forty-five young lawyers outside the private sector whose vision and commitment are changing lives.” Berkeley’s Ecology Law Quarterly awarded Cole its 1997 Environmental Leadership Award for “outstanding contributions to the development of environmental law and policy,” and the American Bar Association’s Barrister magazine named Cole one of “20 young lawyers making a difference” for his pioneering legal work. Community organizations have also honored Cole for his contributions to the environmental justice movement.

Cole was the co-founder and editor emeritus of the journal Race, Poverty & the Environment. He recently published, with Professor Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (NYU Press, 2001). His legal publications include “Empowerment as they Key to Environmental Protection: the Need for Environmental Poverty Law,” in the Ecology Law Quarterly, as well as pieces in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, the Journal of Environmental Law & Litigation, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, and the Michigan Law Review, among others. He has taught as a visiting professor at UC-Hastings School of Law, and also taught seminars on environmental justice at Stanford Law School, UC-Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and Hastings. Cole graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and with honors from Stanford University.

Memorial Website»

Publications »
www.lukecole.com »

Alegría De La Cruz
Staff Attorney
San Francisco

Alegría joined CRPE in March, 2009. Alegría was born in Delano, California. The daughter and granddaughter of farmworker organizers, Alegría has spent most of her life working as an activist for social change. After graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in History in 1997, Alegría spent three years in Southeast Asia, working in economic development, but it didn’t take her long to see that the challenges developing nations were facing in Asia – poverty, exploitation of marginalized people, environmental degradation – were the same ones facing her own community in the Central Valley of California. After graduating from law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall, in 2003, Alegría went on to work at California Rural Legal Assistance in Fresno as an advocate for farmworkers in the Central Valley. Alegría serves on the board of Centro Binacional por el Desarrollo del Indigena Oaxaqueno (CBDIO), a state-wide initiative that addresses the legal needs and develops capacity in Indigenous communities throughout California.  She was a Roots of Change Fellow in 2008, working in collaboration with other fellows to creatively address the challenges facing our food system. Alegría was awarded the 2008 Hon. Thelton E. Henderson Social Justice Prize from Boalt Hall for her work.
Alegría is the proud mother of Omé, who motivates her to fight for a healthy and sustainable future every day. ¡Si se puede!

Caroline Farrell

Caroline is originally from Wellesley, Massachusetts. She attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Before going to law school, she taught English in Yokohama, Japan. Caroline graduated from Golden Gate University School of Law in 1999. She moved down to Delano in November 1999 to work on environmental justice issues in California’s Central Valley. She has quickly established a reputation as one of the Valley’s foremost environmental justice advocates, going toe-to-toe with agricultural polluters from Fresno to Bakersfield. She was instrumental in forcing Safety-Kleen Corporation to stop accepting radioactive waste at its toxic waste dump near Buttonwillow. Her advocacy helped CRPE win the Carla Bard Award from California Water Policy Advocates.

Catherine Garoupa

Catherine Garoupa was raised in Madera, California, and is a proud third generation Central Valley resident.  In 2001, she graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (with Honors and Distinction) and a Minor in English, spending two semester abroad programs: in Delhi, India and Bayreuth, Germany.

Garoupa graduated with her Master’s in Social Work (MSW) from California State University, Fresno. As a graduate student intern, she worked with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Fresno Center for Nonviolence (FCNV) coordinating free educational programs and collaborating with other community-based organizations on issues of peace and social justice. FCNV honored her efforts with their 2004 “Way of Peace” award. During her second year placement at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, Garoupa explored the functioning of local government, politics, and policy. She was also actively involved on campus through student organizations, by serving on the President’s Commission on Human Rights and Equity, and as an employee of the Central Valley Cultural Heritage Institute. 

Upon graduating with her MSW, Catherine served as an American India Foundation Service Corps Fellow and was placed with Panchayat Rule and Gender Awareness Training Institute, a non-governmental organization that informs women about local self-governance and political empowerment. She lived and worked at this Dehradun, Uttaranchal, India based NGO and assisted in many capacities, documenting fieldwork, editing a book and facilitating its publication, and researching and writing a grant. Garoupa loves to read, travel, enjoy nature, spend time with family, and walk her weenie dogs.

Valerie Gorospe
Administrative Assistant
Delano

Valerie Gorospe works as the Administrative Assistant in Delano. Valerie has worked in the medical field since 1998, as a Medical Assistant and Medical Assisting Instructor. She has an A.S. degree in Clinical and Administrative Medical Assisting. She lives in Delano, is the mom of three fantastic children, and also is the proud grand-daughter of the late Pantaleon Ancheta. She was raised in Earlimart, California. Growing up across the street from the grape fields, Valerie saw firsthand (but didn't realize as a child) environmental injustices. She has seen the negative health effects that pesticides can bring to humans in her own family. Valerie is excited to be a part of the CRPE team!

Jennifer Giddings
Staff Attorney
Delano

Jennifer grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and moved to New York at 17 to study international politics at New York University. During college, she took a semester off to move back to Tucson and work at the Southern Arizona People’s Law Center, where she considers she began her career in civil and human rights. After college, Jennifer attended Hastings, emphasizing international law in her studies. During law school, Jennifer worked at the California Appellate Project, in the Unrepresented Condemned Inmates Project, providing interim council to death row inmates awaiting their appeals. After graduating in 2006, Jennifer moved to The Netherlands and clerked for Appeals Judge Liu Daqun at the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in The Hague. She then moved to Sierra Leone, where she clerked for the Trial Chamber at the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal, and co-drafted the judgment against the Civil Defence Forces. In 2007, she returned to The Hague and volunteered at the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal while earning her Advanced LLM in public international law with a specialization in international criminal law. She returned to the United States in 2008, and shortly thereafter began working as a staff attorney at the CRPE. She is hoping that her experience with international human rights law will be a useful tool in the fight for environmental justice in the San Joaquin Valley, and beyond.

Refugio Valencia Gutierrez
Community Organizer
Delano

Born in Michoacan Mexico, Refugio first came to U.S. in 1987 to Ventura County, CA. He worked in the fields as farm worker for about 17 years, mostly under union contract as member of United Farm Workers Union (UFW). As a member Refugio was very active with the union. He participated in the UFW grape boycott, helping to mobilize members in Los Angeles and other cities. He visited stores to ask for support for farm workers rights. He participated in the UFW campaign for the 1986 Immigration Reform that gave thousands of people the opportunity to become legal in U.S. He participated in campaigns in support of local and state candidates who supported farm worker’s rights. As a member, Refugio participated in his place of employment where he worked as crew representative and member of the leadership committee. In June 1996 Refugio started working as an organizer for UFW. He organized in the Watsonville Salinas area for the strawberry campaign that eventually won union contracts representing farm workers. Refugio was an organizer with UFW until 1999. Refugio joined the Center on Race Poverty & the Environment as community organizer on March 1, 2009

Lupe Martinez

Director of Organizing
Delano

Guadalupe Martinez was born in Brownsville, Texas, and moved to California with his mother and family in 1964 after his father suffered a fatal tractor accident.  He soon started working in the field of the San Joaquin Valley, working for a variety of farm labor contractors.  Martinez left school at an early age to work to provide for his family.  In 1973, he met Maria Gallegos while attending night school.  They were married shortly afterward and have lived together to this day, raising three children, Esmeralda, Jorge and Jeraldo. 

While working in the grape fields in Ducor, Martinez met several organizers from the United Farm Workers, including Cesar Chavez. That was his first encounter with the Union and the taste for organizing and seeking justice never left him. He soon joined the UFW staff in Delano and worked as a full-time volunteer, tirelessly organizing farm workers for $10 a week stipend. In 1984 Cesar asked Martinez to move to Canada to help organize the grape boycott.  Because of his dedication and belief, Martinez moved his family to Toronto, Ontario, Canada where they lived and organized support for the UFW. Upon his return from Canada in 1988, he continued working with the Union including organizing the local community supporting Cesar’s “Fast for Life” in Delano. 

Arminda Montoya

Chief Financial Officer
San Francisco

With 20 years of accounting experience from working with both private industry and non-profit organizations, Arminda understands the needs of non-profits and the importance of ensuring proper presentation of financial information. In recent years she has worked closely with such groups as The Women’s Foundation of California, La Raza Centro Legal and CRPE.

Irma Medellin

Community Organizer,
Delano

Irma Medellin was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. She immigrated to the United State 20 years ago. She worked in the fields picking grapes, apples, chile peppers, and olives. She also worked in the packing houses around Lindsay, CA and worked as a cook in a local restaurant.

Irma is the proud mother of four daughters and for ten years, she devoted herself to her children’s education. During this time, Irma worked with other parents on a project, “Our Life, Our Voice” which supported immigrants through the pain of leaving their country of origin.

Since then, Irma has been very active with her community, particularly around social justice issues around pesticides, air quality and water issues. She was a student of the Migrant Photography Project where she chronicled the farm worker experience through photographs and learned how to make black and white prints. Irma also found el Quinto Sol de America six years ago. El Quinto Sol works to improve the lives of immigrants by providing educating about their rights and their health. Irma is enthusiastic about her job and she hopes to touch the lives of the people who live in rural areas. Irma is a wonderful community organizer and is passionate about human rights. Irma has been recognized for her work on behalf of her community. She is the recipient of the Rose Foundation’s Anthony Prize and the Health and Justice Award from PANNA.

Brent Newell

Brent Newell, CRPE’s Legal Director, was born and raised in Northern California, graduating from Cardinal Newman High School of Santa Rosa. In 1992, he earned a degree in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, which included a year studying abroad at the Wirtschafts Universität Wien and the Universität Wien in Austria. In 1997, he enrolled at the University of Oregon School of Law and a year later joined CRPE as a summer legal intern. During that summer, he did the legal and factual research that helped CRPE embark on a multi-year campaign to regulate animal factories. After graduating in 2000, Brent joined CRPE as an Equal Justice Fellow in CRPE’s Delano office to work on a project to help rural communities protect themselves from unregulated animal factory air pollution. In 2003, Brent established the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality Project to provide legal and community organizing assistance to communities struggling for healthy air in the nation’s most polluted air basin. Now living in the Bay Area and working in CRPE’s San Francisco office, Brent enjoys most of his spare time with his family and still manages to get away for a few days of backpacking and fly fishing each year.

Marybelle Nzegwu

Marybelle Nzegwu was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.  She attended two years of high school in Watts, seeing firsthand economic and environmental injustice but not knowing how to address the problems she saw. She left Los Angeles at 17 to attend the University of California at San Diego where she majored in Political Theory and spent a year studying in Costa Rica. Nzegwu attended the University of California-Hastings College of the Law where she excelled in the Evans Constitutional Moot Court Competition and served on the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. During her first year at Hastings, she took Luke Cole’s Environmental Law class, where she heard the term Environmental Justice for the first time. After finding out more about the movement and about CRPE, she worked as an intern for CRPE both summers of law school. At CRPE, Nzegwu staffs the Civil Rights Project, working with CRPE’s civil rights clients nationwide and helping to build a coalition of supporters for a Civil Rights Restoration Act to restore the disparate impact standard to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  When not working, Nzegwu has many interests, including playing the piano and learning the bass guitar.

Lauren Richter,

Lauren Richter joins CRPE as the San Francisco office development and administrative assistant. She recently completed her Master’s in sociology at Washington State University where she studied environmental sociology with a focus on environmental justice spatial research. Her thesis examined the extent to which rural low-income minority populations in the U.S. are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. Before attending graduate school, Lauren taught English in rural Japan. She completed her undergraduate degree in sociology at Connecticut College, and received a certificate in conservation biology and environmental studies. Since moving to San Francisco in the fall of 2008, Lauren has spent her time volunteering with Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and Green For All.

Sofia Sarabia

Sofia Sarabia joined CRPE’s San Francisco office as a staff attorney in February 2008.  She graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.S. in Environmental Policy, Analysis and Planning.  Sofia attended law school planning a career in the environmental justice field.  She received her law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law in 2002.  At CRPE, Sofia works on a variety of issues including air quality, land use, and climate change.  Before coming to CRPE, Sofia was a staff attorney in Sacramento for Legal Services of Northern California working on a variety of poverty law issues.  When not working, Sofia enjoys traveling anywhere that requires a passport and spending time with her family.

Daniela Simunovic
Community Organizer
Delano

Daniela Simunovic works as a community organizer in Delano, working mainly on air quality issues.  She is originally from Santiago, Chile but has spent the majority of her life in the San Joaquin Valley.  Daniela holds a B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Justice and the Community from St. Mary’s College of California, Moraga. Before joining CRPE she spent a year working in Fresno as a part of Fresno Metro Ministry. While at FMM she worked on air quality issues, coordinated the New Leaders for Better Health Program, and published “Creando Conecciones,” a Spanish language consumer guide to social services in Fresno County.  She has also done union organizing. 

Don Spradlin
Development Director
Delano

Don Spradlin grew up in Oklahoma City and attended the University of Oklahoma for a degree in marketing. He then attended Harvard Business School for his MBA. His first job out of Harvard was as an investment banker in Los Angeles. Don went on to focus on real estate investments and maintains a current real estate broker's license. He earned his second Masters Degree in 1994, this one in Clinical Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and practiced psychotherapy for four years. Don took his first nonprofit job in 1999 as the Development Director for Maitri Compassionate Care, a 15-bed AIDS Hospice in San Francisco. That same year he founded the Noble Beast Foundation, which has raised over $250,000 from events and donated those funds to community service organizations selected by the Foundation’s Board. He has also been a Board member of LA Shanti and the Victory Fund and is currently a member of the Craigslist Foundation’s Advisory Board. 

Bates

Bates is a native of Bakersfield. Caroline adopted Bates from the Bakersfield SPCA when he was five months old. Bates greets visitors to CRPE’s Delano office and keeps staff morale high and stress levels down.