• About Public Advocates
• Staff
• Board of Governors
• Funding Organizations

Public Advocates challenges the systemic causes of poverty and discrimination by promoting civil rights through advocacy, litigation, and partnership with low-income communities, people of color, and immigrants.

Public Advocates uses a range of strategies, including litigation and administrative actions, policy advocacy, multi-cultural coalition building, and community development, to promote equity and systemic change. Public Advocates’ present work focuses on education, housing, transit equity, consumer, insurance, and telecommunications issues.

• Public Advocates was one of the lead counsel in Williams v. State of California, in which a class of children and their families reached an historic agreement with the State to ensure children’s basic educational right to qualified teachers, textbooks, and decent facilities. To assure that school improvements actually reach the neediest students and least advantaged schools, Public Advocates remains actively involved in legislative advocacy, community organizing and education, and monitoring.

• Public Advocates has successfully represented inner city drivers in “redlined" zip-code territories denied affordable automobile insurance, women and minority police officers for the City of San Francisco, more than 50,000 Latino, African-American, and Asian educators denied employment opportunities in California public schools, and tens of thousands of pregnant undocumented immigrants denied prenatal care.

• The firm's clients have included more than seventy diverse community organizations and plaintiff classes, such as the National Council of La Raza, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Association of Mexican American Educators, World Institute on Disability, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and California Rural Indian Health Board.

• In addition, Public Advocates has helped to launch major, now independent, organizations such as Health Access, Latino Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute, Urban Strategies Council, HomeBase, and the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California.

As a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Public Advocates relies on financial support from individuals, corporations, and foundations, and recovery of reasonable attorney fees in court cases, to continue its mission and raise a voice for social justice. We are actively seeking funding from local and national foundations to join recent support from the Hewlett, Marguerite Casey, VanLobenSels/RembeRock, and San Francisco Foundations, and Racial Justice Collaborative Fund, Equal Access Fund of the State Bar, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights.