Outside of her work with the Sustainable Economies Law Center, Janelle Orsi is an attorney and mediator focused on helping individuals and organizations share resources and create more sustainable communities. Through the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, she works with social enterprises, non-profits, cooperatives, community gardens, cohousing communities, ecovillages, and others doing innovative work to change the world. Previously, she was Executive Director of Women Defenders, a professional organization of women defense attorneys and has worked in a range of legal practice areas, including criminal defense, youth law, immigration, adoptions, LGBT rights, and estate planning. She attended UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Janelle is co-author of a book published by Nolo Press, called The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community, a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds. Janelle also writes regularly for Shareable.net.

Jenny Kassan, Community-Supported Entrepreneurship Program Director and SELC Co-Founder

Jenny Kassan is an attorney and community development consultant, specializing in environmentally friendly and socially responsible ventures. She is the managing director of K2 Law Group and C.E.O. of Cutting Edge Capital, a business that helps social enterprises raise capital from their communities. Her legal practice areas include small business start-up and financing, securities regulation, nonprofit law, business agreements, real estate development, franchising, cooperatives, and assessment districts.

Jenny earned a masters degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School. She worked for eleven years at the Unity Council, a nonprofit community development corporation in Oakland, where she served as staff attorney and managed community economic development projects including the formation and management of several social ventures designed to employ and create business ownership opportunities for low-income community residents.

Christen is an attorney focused on nonprofits, co-ops, and socially responsible businesses. Through Katovich Law Group, she advises clients on start-up and financing, corporate and co-op law, nonprofit law, securities regulation, and business transactions. She is a former consultant with the National Community Development Institute, where she facilitated organizational sustainability programs for economic, environmental, and racial justice groups. She also trained and organized in Asian American communities around immigrant civic engagement, language access, and workers’ rights, through the Korean American Coalition and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.

Christen attended U.C. Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and Yale University. She serves on the board of the Sustainable Business Alliance. She is also involved with the Community Capital Working Group, which supports the movement toward localized investments through education, advocacy, and direct action. She wants to help build and participate in restorative, inclusive, and rational economies.

Christina Oatfield, Food Policy Director

Christina works to research and advocate for laws that create opportunities for start-up and small-scale food businesses as well as the hobby baker or backyard gardener seeking to supplement their income. Her current priority is coordinating SELC’s involvement in the campaign to support the California Homemade Food Act, a cottage food law for California.

Christina earned her B.S. in Environmental Sciences at UC Berkeley where she wrote a thesis about student-run food cooperatives and co-founded the Berkeley Student Food Collective, a nonprofit educational grocery market that increases students’ access to real food at affordable prices. She also served two terms in the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) Senate, directed the campus Sustainability Team and served on the Board of the Berkeley Student Cooperative.

Yassi manages SELC’s Urban Agriculture Legal Resource Library (UALRL) in addition to contributing to the Planning & Zoning section. She is working with a growing team of library researchers to publicly launch the UALRL website by summer 2012.

Yassi holds a B.S in Conservation & Resource Studies and a minor in City & Regional Planning from U.C. Berkeley. Her studies center on integrating ecology, food systems, and sustainable development principles into urban settings. Her work in this field includes cofounding the Berkeley Student Food Collective nonprofit marketplace, assistant teaching an Oakland middle school cooking and gardening class, and teaching a 2-unit student-led course to 35 Berkeley undergraduate students about the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of local and globalized food systems in her undergraduate career. Currently, Yassi is living and working in Santa Barbara while preparing for graduate school in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She intends to use this degree to help bridge the gaps between science and
policy.

Julie Pennington, SELC Intern

Julie’s passion for resource sharing was sparked at House of Commons, a student cooperative where she lived during college in Austin, Texas. She has worked with Inter-cooperative Council in Austin, Madison Community Co-op in Madison, WI, and with North American Students for Cooperation (NASCO), organizing and educating affordable group equity co-ops for the cooperative movement. She is a board member with Common Fire Foundation, which supports living spaces that bridge transformation in the community to transformation in the world. In addition to her work with shared communities, Julie has collaborated with truly amazing queer youth to organize for safer schools in Texas and beyond. She is preparing for law school where she plans to strengthen her advocacy reach as a tool for social change.

Bryan is an attorney in San Francisco. He is the owner of Springmeyer Law, a law firm that represents and advises startup technology companies in matters ranging from incorporation, intellectual property and employee matters to early-stage investments. Through his pro bono work, Bryan also works on transactional matters for non-profits, represents ex-offender entrepreneurs, assists individuals in clearing their criminal records, and represents indigent inmates in habeas and other post-conviction actions. Bryan went to UCLA for undergrad and UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) for law school.

Bryan enjoys web development and design, and builds web applications, mostly to automate legal processes. He has also designed and maintains a few websites for non-profit agencies and friends’ law and accounting practices.

Esperanza Pallana, Research Associate

Esperanza works with SELC as a volunteer researcher. Her passion is to strengthen communities through the preservation of food heritage and by supporting local agriculture and regional food economies. Esperanza studied Urban Studies at San Francisco State University and received a Master in Nonprofit Administration from University of San Francisco where she studied collaborative behavior to create sustainable public school food systems. As an urban farmer in Oakland, Esperanza co-founded the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance.