Board of Directors

ENGELS GARCIA has been with Human Agenda for the past 9 years in defending the human rights of immigrants in Santa Clara County by founding CLARO, the immigration legal service program for Human Agenda. He majored in Global Studies with a regional emphasis on Latin America and Iran, receiving his B.A. from San José State University. Engels was a legal advocate for EF4C from 2015 to 2016. He is an Indigenous Ñuu Savi who worked in the fields to pay for his education and collaborates with grassroots organizations to protect and promote the culture of the Oaxacan people in California. He has been an active member of Comite Guelaguetza since 2005 and is a co-founder and active member of CEENI, an indigenous youth collective.

ELIZABETH ALVAREZ has dedicated her life to addressing inequities in education, health, the environment, access to safety net services, and affordable housing through civic activism, community development, and direct service. A significant milestone in her career was her engagement with People Acting in Community Together (PACT) during its small school movement starting in 2002. Elizabeth is an individual who is highly motivated and passionate about abolishing the systemic barriers to education and community empowerment and believes strongly in the creation of services and resources grounded in the communities they are intended to serve. As a San José native, mother of five and grandmother of four boys, she is deeply committed to ensuring that all children and families have the opportunities they need to thrive.

JULIE SOLOMON is a program evaluation consultant in the health sector. Through J. Solomon Consulting, LLC, she works with non-governmental organizations, grantmakers, government agencies, universities, and coalitions in the U.S. and internationally to assess program results and support learning and program improvement. Julie has a B.A. in linguistic anthropology and Spanish literature from Brandeis University and an A.M. and Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University. She served on the City of Mountain View Human Relations Commission for 6 years, through which she co-led needs and assets assessments of the LGBTQ+ community and immigrant community, as well as implemented community engagement and educational activities pertaining to police-community relations and the history of discrimination in housing.

SHARAT G. LIN writes and lectures on global political economy, labor migration, participatory democracy, social movements, the Middle East, and public health. He was a past president of the San José Peace and Justice Center. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Initiative for Equality since 2019 and a member of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Committee since 2010. He has served as an election observer in numerous countries in Latin America and in states across the U.S. He is peace dancer and the curator of The Art of Protest.

RHONDA BERRY is the founder and Co-Executive Director of Our City Forest, an innovative urban forestry nonprofit serving the City of San José and County of Santa Clara since 1994. Before that, she worked for California ReLeaf in San Francisco. She is a leader in the fields of organizational development and social ecology.

SALEM AJLUNI is a native of Michigan and the son Palestinian immigrants. He studied economics at San José State University and the University of Utah and taught college economics for more than a decade during the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1996-2001 he was the Chief Economist for the Office of the United Nations Special Co-ordinator in the Occupied Territories (UNSCO) based in Gaza where he led research on the economy of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Santa Clara County Single Payer Health Care Coalition and since 2023 has been a board member of Human Agenda.

RICHARD HOBBS is the founder of Human Agenda. He works to democratize our economic, financial, and political institutions via worker-owned cooperatives, public banking, and the South Bay Progressive Alliance, where he serves on the steering committee.  He heads Emulation Tours with trips to Mondragon, Spain, and Cuba and also serves as an immigration attorney with CLARO (the Human Agenda legal collective) and his own law office.  Richard previously served as the Director of Citizenship and Immigrant Programs and the Office of Human Relations of Santa Clara County and as a trustee for the San José-Evergreen Community College District.  A former Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan and Ecuador, he has lived, worked, made presentations, or studied in over 50 countries, including a presentation to staff members of the Gross National Happiness Commission of Bhutan in 2011. Richard has master’s degrees from the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) and San José State University (California) and a Juris Doctor from Golden Gate University (San Francisco, California)

SAM HO has worked in the areas of community building and human, social, and community services for over 20 years. He is currently a human resources manager specializing in diversity for the San José-Evergreen Community College District (California). Previously, he served as the Executive Director of a non-profit community-based organization in Southern California. In that capacity, he served low-income at-risk populations and worked with diverse communities and leaders representing all ethnic groups and backgrounds. Sam has an MBA in management from National University (La Jolla, California).

LEILA FOROUHI is a De Anza Middle College graduate and an alumnus of the University of California Santa Cruz, San José State University, and most recently, Texas Tech University where she received a Master’s degree in Media and Mass Communication and was a columnist for its student paper, the Daily Toreador. She has also worked as a news writer for PressTV in Tehran, Iran and as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children in the Child Welfare system in Texas. She has enjoyed teaching high school, university and adult education courses in English as a second language, business and professional communication, environmental health hazards, SAT prep, and mathematics. She gets inspiration from interacting with, teaching and learning from people with diverse backgrounds from all walks of life.

AJINKYA ASHOK resides in San José, California. and immigrated from India to study his Master’s at San José State University. Since then, he has been working as a software engineer. For the last few years, he has been engaged in grassroots organizing and activities to challenge all kinds of oppression — racial, caste, religious, gender, and class. Apart from this work, he likes to go on walks, ride his bicycle and read in his spare time.

ALEX DILLARD is currently studying Political Science at Cañada College. He is part of San José Against War, U.S. Hands Off Cuba Committee, US Peace Council and many other anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations and has organized major national marches and conferences around the issues of Palestine and US imperialism. In his spare time, he get great joy from reading and writing.

REBECA ARMENDARIZ is a Gilroy City Councilmember, long-time community organizer, and advocate for workers rights. She is a founding board member of Gilroy Growing Smarter as well as CARAS, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy, service, and cultural events like the Cesar Chavez Champions Awards and the Gilroy Tamal Festival. Rebeca has also served on the Advisory Committee of the Silicon Valley Women’s March from 2017 to 2019, the Gilroy Planning Commission from 2016 to 2020, the Gilroy Housing Advisory Committee, Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee, and Parks & Recreation Commission as well as a delegate for Assembly District 30 to the California Democratic Party. She is fourth-generation Gilroyan and a proud mother and daughter and granddaughter of farmworkers.

YANET GUTIERREZ is a Legal Education Access Pipeline (LEAP) Fellow Cohort and a San José State University graduate in Political Science.