Sarah Paoletti, Board President
Clinical Supervisor and Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Sarah Paoletti is a Practice Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she founded and directs the Transnational Legal Clinic. From 2003-2006, she was a Practitioner-in-Residence in Read More the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Washington College of Law American University, where she also taught a seminar on the labor and employment rights of immigrant workers. Her areas of expertise include international human rights, immigrant and migrant rights, asylum law, and labor and employment law. She has written on and presented on the intersection of migration and international human rights, particularly as it relates to the labor rights of migrants in the U.S., before Committees of the United Nations, the Organization of American States and at different conferences. She was a staff attorney at Friends of Farmworkers, Inc., a statewide legal services program serving migrant workers in Pennsylvania, where she was an Independence Foundation Public Interest Fellow, as well as a Skadden Fellow (1998-1999, 2000-2003), and currently serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors for that Organization. She also serves as President of the Board of Directors of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. (Center for Workers Rights, based in Zacatecas, MX). From 1999 to 2000, she was a law clerk for the Hon. Judge Anthony J. Scirica, U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit. She received her JD from the Washington College of Law American University (summa cum laude) in 1998, and her B.A. from Yale University in 1992.
Rick Mines, Board Vice-President
Retired Research Director, California Institute for Rural Studies
Rick Mines is an agricultural economist by training. However, for the last 33 years he has focused most of his energy on survey research among Mexican farmworkers and other immigrants. His research, carried out in both the Read More United States and Mexico, has been funded both by private foundations and government agencies. Over three decades, Mines’ surveys have probed the living conditions, migration patterns, social service delivery and working conditions of generations of Mexican immigrants. He designed, implemented, and for many years managed the model farmworker survey of our period—the Department of Labor’s 20 year-old National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). The NAWS has enabled a more accurate public perception of the characteristics of the farmworker population. Rick has always taken an active, hands-on role in all aspects of the surveys he conducted, including developing the questionnaires, training the interviewers, conducting many interviews himself, supervising the interview staff, cleaning and analyzing the data and writing up reports of the findings.
Rick served in the Peace Corps in Paraguay; he holds BAs in French and History from U.C. Berkeley, an MA in Latin American History from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley.
Ana Avendaño, Board Secretary
Assistant to the President for Immigration and Community Action, AFL-CIO
Ana Avendaño is Assistant to the President and Director of Immigration and Community Action at the AFL-CIO. She advises national and local union leaders on immigration policy and other matters that impact immigrant workers. She works closely Read More with community partners on the quest for comprehensive immigration reform. She was formerly an Associate General Counsel at the AFL-CIO. Before joining the AFL-CIO, she served as Assistant General Counsel to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
Ana also served as the United States Worker Representative to the International Labor Organization (ILO) Committee on Migration in 2004. She was appointed to serve on the ILO’s Panel of Experts on Migration in 2005. She testified before the Informal Interactive Hearings of the United Nations’ General Assembly with Non-Governmental Organizations, Civil Society Organizations and the Private Sector on International Migration and Development in 2006, and also served in the Appellate Court Branch of the National Labor Relations Board, and in private practice in San Francisco, CA and Washington, DC.
She is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and the University of California at Berkeley.
Cynthia Rice, Board Treasurer
Director of Litigation Advocacy & Training, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc
