The Abascal Fellows
The Abascal Fellowship is a one-year post-graduate fellowship for UC Law SF graduates. The fellowship seeks to fund projects that include legal advocacy, community education, and policy change in areas effecting people who are denied access to the legal system. The fellowship is designed to provide seed money for new projects rather than make grants for research, long-term litigation, or to assist in established, on-going projects. The projects must be designed to achieve results within a year, can become self-supporting and develop additional sources of funding during and after the initial grant year.
The Fellowship has provided funding for the following Fellows and Projects:
Jillian MacLeod
Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF)
2023-2024
Project: To ensure that all people with disabilities have equal access to reproductive health services in California through outreach, education, and trainings. The project will take a multifaceted approach and aims to: 1) educate people with disabilities about their legal rights and remedies, including the right to supported decision-making, 2) educate reproductive care providers about their legal duties and best practices when serving people with disabilities, and 3) advocate for enforcement of disability access to reproductive healthcare services and information.
Jameelah Najieb
Disability Right Advocates
2022-2023
Project: To address the punishment, criminalization, and displacement of unhoused people throughout California by dismantling discriminatory laws and ordinances that forcibly remove all unhoused people, a majority of whom have disabilities, from their public areas of rest. This project uses impact litigation and negotiations as tools to push back against the criminalization of unhoused people with disabilities and advocates for humane solutions such as reasonable accommodations and comprehensive community services including accessible and affordable housing.
Julie Wands Bourdoiseau
Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS)
2021-2022
Project: To increase asylum approvals, particularly for Central American and Afro-Caribbean applicants, help CGRS’s promote advocacy work towards transforming the anti-immigrant narrative, and address the root causes of refugee flight. This project will develop a sustainable network of vetted expert witnesses and a toolkit for attorneys on working with experts. By identifying experts, and developing and providing their testimony and declarations, the project will create a repository of “global” expert declarations, which provide facts and analysis of country conditions and can be submitted in a range of cases or easily tailored to an individual’s specific facts.
Christina “CJ” Connolly
East Bay Children’s Law Offices
2021-2022
Project: To disrupt the foster care-to-prison pipeline by protecting the education and permanency rights of Alameda County foster care youth in congregate care. The project will emphasize empowering people to self-advocate, will lead the office’s adaption and enforcement of new federal and state laws surrounding congregate care, and will specialize in direct advocacy of clients with high mental health needs.
Ethan Silverstein
Alliance for Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)
2020-2021
Project: To serve tenants who are not facing an eviction lawsuit retain possession of their unit and remedy unlivable conditions due to landlord harassment, deferred maintenance, or other illegal tactics. The project utilized affirmative litigation both to obtain equitable and injunctive relief under Oakland Tenant Project Ordinance and to aid tenant organizing and improve conditions in multi-use buildings.
Alexandra “Alex” Binsfeld-Debus
TGI Justice (Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP)
2019-2020
Project: To support incarcerated transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex (TGI) people by introducing legislation to abolish solitary confinement in California prisons. The project had three components: to introduce a bill to end the use of solitary confinement in California; to train and build a network of attorneys to directly represent transgender people incarcerated in California prisons; and to conduct a survey directed at all incarcerated people in California, the aims being to collect data and monitor laws and settlements protecting the TGI community.
Ursula Lindsey
PolicyLink Legal
2018-2019
Project: To aid in the implementation of existing Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs) made between community coalitions and developers, concerning major development projects in the San Francisco Bayview and South-Central Los Angeles. The project provided direct legal representation to community-coalition clients in negotiations over CBA amendment and enforcement. It also gathered data and conducted evaluative research to inform future, burgeoning policy regarding CBAs as a tool for economic empowerment.
Andrea Pearce
California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA)
2017-2018
Project: To improve access to education and legal advocacy for victims of sexual violence and harassment working in the agricultural industry in California’s Central Valley. This project will outreach to agricultural workers regarding their rights on issues of sexual harassment, and provide direct services to victims of sexual harassment, including advice, counsel, mediation, and litigation support. The overall impact will be to advocate for systematic change and protection of workers and victims of sexual violence in the agricultural industry through community education and exposure to sexual assault issues.
Rebecca Wildman-Tobriner
Youth Law Center (YLC)
2016-2017
Project: To transform the treatment of youth in foster care and juvenile justice from an emphasis on safety to one of wellness. Strategies for change included utilizing both creative and traditional legal methods. The pathways involved (1) enforcing state and local policies through litigation, (2) advocating for administrative changes to ensure access to wellness benefits and services, (3) developing model policies and practices that improve wellness, and (4) training stakeholders to improve the quality of children’s individual legal experiences. The goal of this work was to increase access to higher education and improve wellness across the lifespan for these youth.
Jessica Cassella
National Housing Law Project (NHLP)
2015-2016
Project: To protect tenants’ rights and ensure that the Federal Rental Assistance Demonstration Act (RAD) enacted by Congress in 2012 to preserve and improve public housing achieves its goals. Under RAD San Francisco committed to convert 5,000 public housing units to a Section 8 program. Prior to the project, there were no legal resources dedicated to RAD conversions. The work ensured legal agreements and policies followed best practices for tenant protections, provided training and resources for tenants and advocates, developed resources, worked with stakeholders, and provided litigation support.
Ann Munene
Legal Aid of Marin
2014-2015
Project: To provide increased access to employment legal services to the under-served and second largest low-wage income population in Marin County, the Black Community. The project aimed to create safe zones and establish intake locations in the community; provided community workshops and materials to educate individuals on employment rights; represented individuals and classes in employment law matters; and publicized successful advocacy efforts.
Monica Ault
Drug Policy Alliance
2013-2014
Project: To improve the health of northern New Mexicans addicted to opioids and reduce local incarceration rates, by advocating a new form of community policing and developing and implementing pre-booking diversion programs for low-level drug offenders (aka “LEAD”). This included collaborating with local stakeholders to develop and design a program that involved policy goal refinements; new implementation procedures; evaluation and data gathering; provision of culturally appropriate services; sustainable funding; and an on-call legal clinic
Barbara Pinto
Immigrant Legal Resource Center
2012-2013
Project: Provide advocacy, outreach, and assistance to immigrants and immigration practitioners regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s prosecutorial discretion policies, including the recent Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as assist immigrants in their requests for exercises of discretion and deferred action.
Elizabeth Aakhus
California Rural Legal Assistance
2011-2012
Project: To confront Kern County’s school-to-nowhere pipeline by challenging punitive discipline policies, holding schools accountable for educational disparities, building ties amongst schools, parent committees and community organizations, and equipping parents and community advocates with tools to promote education equity in California’s indigent rural and farm worker communities.
Allison Crapo
National Center for Youth Law
2009-2010
Project: To improve the outcomes of children in California with mental health needs who are entangled in the juvenile justice system. The project worked with Bay Area collaborative juvenile mental health courts to divert youth from detention and connect them to appropriate mental health services and support. It also provided direct representation to secure public benefits for youth and recruit advocates to join collaborative effort.
Kusia Hreshchyshyn
East Bay Sanctuary
2007-2008
Project: To oversee all gender-based claims within the East Bay Sanctuary’s affirmative asylum program. The project conducted community outreach to religious, social, and medical agencies, and collaborate with other nonprofits; provided direct representation of asylum seekers; supervised students; helped deserving asylees obtained a path to full United States citizenship and a new lease on life; and employed litigation strategies to make lasting impacts on the favorable adjudication of future cases.
Avinash “Avi” Kar
Center on Race Poverty and the Environment (CRPE)
2006-2007
Project: The project targeted lawsuits to bring attention to ozone and particulate matter air pollution and force local decision makers to protect public health. The specific focus was on the health risks of low-income rural communities in San Joaquin Valley against industrial agricultural polluters who generate air polluting mechanisms, such as ethanol plants and mega-dairy farms.
Nasha Vida
Immigrant Legal Resource Center
2003-2004
Project: The project focused on high incidence of domestic violence needs of immigrant communities in five rural Northern California counties. Strategies included organizing and educating shelters, health clinics and other service providers on legal avenues for relief though the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA) and U-Visa’s. The project especially targeted providers unaware of special legal protections for immigrants.
Katie Silberman
Safe Actions for Environmental Health (SAFE Health)
2000-2001
Project: To improve the health of east Oakland residents exposed to environmental toxins on the interstate 880 corridor by providing legal advocacy for community driven policy changes. The project’s multi-pronged approach included educating the community on use of the law, drafting administrative complaints and model legislation, and filing lawsuits with the assistance of outside legal counsel.