Funders for Climate Equity September Meeting

Beatrice Camacho is a first-generation Mexican-American woman born and raised in Sonoma County, California to low-income, working-class parents who immigrated to Sonoma County from Northern Mexico in 1985. As a lifelong renter, growing up on Section 8 Housing, she personally understands the importance of dignified and affordable housing. Beatrice studied Business Management at Sonoma State University and is trained in Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices. She is an organizing committee member for Sanación del People/The Peoples’ Healing Clinic, which offers mutual aid in the form of free healing modalities to community members in Sonoma County who otherwise would not have access to them. She has been a Tenant Organizer with North Bay Organizing Project since 2018 and helped organize the Sonoma County Tenants Union. Beatrice is now the first-ever Director of UndocuFund. UndocuFund was created in 2017, as a form of mutual aid that provides direct monetary assistance to undocumented community members in Sonoma County during times of disaster. Undocufund has disbursed over $16.5 million in direct assistance to Sonoma County’s undocumented community members impacted by wildfires, floods, power shutoffs, and COVID-19.

She is passionate about creating the conditions that increase quality of life and makes life more fair for more people. Her work focuses on the intersection of social determinants of health, social inequity, and well-being.

Her experience includes work in municipal government and non-profits, in the Bay Area’s large and small cities. Melissa is an active community member in Oakland and also serves on the Association of Bay Area Government’s Regional Planning Committee, which advises on regional planning issues.

​Before joining BARHII, Melissa served as Senior Program Officer at Boston Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC), where she launched and ran Boston LISC’s Resilient Communities Resilient Families (RCRF) Initiative. The initiative works to ensure that residents of Boston’s Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan neighborhoods benefit from the rising tide of transit and other public investments. During her tenure, RCRF engaged several thousand residents and non-profits in neighborhood planning. The program has invested millions of dollars to fund affordable housing, leadership development, Family Financial Opportunity Center programs, and a local entrepreneurship pipeline program to ensure residents’ financial lives are improving. She was awarded the LISC’s President’s award in 2014 for her work on comprehensive community development.

Gina Solomon is a Principal Investigator at the Public Health Institute, a global non-profit research, and leadership organization that builds capacity for public health programs, policies, and practices. At PHI she directs the Achieving Resilient Communities (ARC) project. Her work focuses on anticipating, preventing, and responding to climate change in the most impacted communities in California, with a particular focus on farmworker communities. Dr. Solomon is a physician with expertise in occupational and environmental medicine and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).Dr. Solomon served as the Deputy Secretary for Science and Health at the California Environmental Protection Agency during the Brown administration. Prior to 2012, she was a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and held several leadership positions at UCSF. She has served on multiple boards and committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; World Health Organization; and federal and state agencies. She has published more than 80 papers and book chapters, as well as one book. Dr. Solomon received her bachelor’s degree from Brown University, her M.D. from Yale, and her M.P.H. from Harvard.