VICTOR OCHOA

Victor Ochoa currently serves as Chair of the Oakland Public Ethics Commission. Mr. Ochoa is a partner at Duran, Ochoa & Icaza, LLP, a civil law practice firm specializing in personal injury, workers compensation, family law, immigration, medical malpractice. He is a member of the Alameda County Bar Association and serves on its Board of Directors. Mr. Ochoa is past Treasurer of the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association and a member of the East Bay Tenants Bar Association. He was the President, Executive Director and Managing Attorney of Centro Legal de la Raza, a non-profit legal services and advocacy organization in Oakland, California. Mr. Ochoa serves on Congresswoman Barbara Lee's Advisory Committee and served on Congressman Ronald V. Dellums' Advisory Committee. He is past president of the Mexican-American Political Association, Northern Alameda Chapter; and past president of La Clinica de la Raza Board of Directors. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall School of Law at U.C. Davis. He resides in Oakland with his wife and 2 children and has been an Oakland resident for 23 years.

BARBARA NEWCOMBE

Barbara Newcombe is a retired newspaper librarian who has lived in Oakland for eighteen years. Previously she worked in Washington DC and Chicago for the Chicago Tribune as Director of its Information Center. While doing volunteer work at the Center for Investigative Journalism in San Francisco, she compiled a guide to California public records, PAPER TRAILS, for which she received a James Madison Freedom of Information Award in 1992. In 1997 she shared this award with Stephen Levine for the second edition of PAPER TRAILS. Ms. Newcombe attended Pomona College (BA), Univ. of Calif (MA), Catholic University (MLS). She is currently involved with the League of Women Voters as a consultant on open government legislation in California as well as local freedom of information and anti-censorship issues. Most recently, she has helped compile Oakland: Guide to Local Government.

ALDEN MUDGE

Alden Mudge is the director of operations and communications at the California Council for the Humanities (CCH), the independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; CCH creates and funds cultural programs for the general public throughout California. Mr. Mudge is a co-chair of the Bay Area study section of the Commonwealth Club of California and serves on the Club’s program committee and California Book Awards jury. He is also an active member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), and has served two terms as IABC’s San Francisco chapter president and one term on the executive committee of IABC’s District Six (ten western states) board. He has lived in Oakland for over ten years.

PETER REINKE

Peter Reinke teaches American History and Government at the Head-Royce School in Oakland. He is also director of Finance, Development and Teacher Training for the Heads Up Alliance, a partnership between the Oakland Unified School District and Head-Royce that works with low-income youth of color from urban schools. Before becoming a teacher, Mr. Reinke served on the legislative staff of U.S. Senator John Chafee, working on a variety of issues including child advocacy and ethics. While in Washington, he served on the board of directors of Senator Jim Jeffords' Everybody Wins Foundation, an effort to combat illiteracy in urban schools. Currently, Mr. Reinke serves on the board of directors of Clausen House, an organization that provides services to 170 developmentally disabled adults, the education committee of the Oakland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the steering committee of the East Bay Common Cause, an advocacy group for good government. He is also the founding chair of the Bay Area Conference on Youth, Activism and Government, a coalition project sponsored by Common Cause, Democracy Matters and the League of Women Voters that encourages civic involvement among high school and college youth. He has worked on a number of local, state, and national political campaigns and is a graduate of Brown University.

LILY MAYUMI KIMURA

Lily Mayumi Kimura has been in private law practice in the Bay Area since 1976 . She specializes in family law litigation, civil litigation, and criminal misdemeanors. She is a past president of the Alameda County Bar Association and was the first Asian American female to serve in that capacity. She is an active lecturer for the State Bar of California, the American Bar Association and other local specialty bar associations on a wide range of topics including legal ethics and the sole practitioner, client relations, minority women, ethical aspects of office sharing, ethical issues in technology and law, cultural issues in family court, and race/ethnic bias. Ms. Kimura earned her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and her J.D. at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

JON H. SYLVESTER

Jon H. Sylvester is a law professor at Golden Gate University. Professor Sylvester earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford, a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. After practicing law in Washington, D.C., he joined the faculty of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. Professor Sylvester has since taught at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and at USF School of Law and Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He has also taught in and/or directed legal education programs in Central America, China, Istanbul, Indonesia and Malta, and spent a year in East Africa as a Fulbright Scholar teaching at the University of Nairobi. Professor Sylvester is a commercial arbitrator certified by the American Arbitration Association and the National Association of Securities Dealers. He is a member of the National Bar Association, the Alameda County Bar Association and the Charles Houston Bar Association. Prior to attending law school, he worked as a television news writer, producer and reporter in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles.

KATHRYN KASCH

Kathryn Kasch is an independent consultant specializing in low-income housing development and finance. Ms. Kasch is an Oakland native who received a B.A. in Sociology from Smith College and a Master’s degree in City Planning from Rutgers. After several years abroad, including two years in the Ivory Coast, she settled in Boston where she worked in government and non-profit housing agencies until she returned to Oakland in 1991. Ms. Kasch has served on the Oakland Rent Board and as an alternate on the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission. She currently serves on the boards of Oakland Community Housing, Inc. and the YWCA of Oakland.