About

Jay Kim

Executive Director

Pronouns: She/Her
Email: jaykim@nlgsf.org
Phone: 415-285-5067 Ext. 104

Jay Kim joined NLGSF in January 2018 with over ten years of community lawyering experience. As a Co-Founder and Co-Director of Common Law, a non-profit organization in New York City that supported community organizing efforts through legal education and legal assistance, Jay helped grow a volunteer-run start-up to a fully funded organization with innovative programming. For over seven years, Jay defended organized street vendors against excessive fines and administrative violations; represented low-income tenants in the Lower East Side fighting eviction and gentrification; and also created a foreclosure defense legal clinic for pro se homeowners. Employing a combination of direct representation, strategic direct action support, and intensive political and legal education, Jay developed a robust model for community lawyering with grassroots partners. This model not only achieved favorable results for individuals but also built community power for member-based organizations of color.

Jay was also a founding member of O4O, a city-wide organizing effort to actualize the human right to housing through direct action. With O4O and Common Law, she organized several large-scale actions, including eviction blockades for tenants facing eviction and foreclosure auction blockades inside New York State Supreme Court. In addition to her time with O4O and Common Law, Jay was an active organizing member of Nodutdol, a membership based organization comprised of progressive Korean Americans working to build solidarity between Koreans and the struggles of other people of color as part of a larger movement for self-determination and liberation.

Prior to joining NLGSF, Jay was a Supervising Attorney and Clinical Instructor at DC Law Students in Court. She supervised and taught trial advocacy skills to a new generation of law students to provide high quality legal services to low-income Washingtonians.

Jay received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and is a proud alum of CUNY School of Law. She is admitted to the bar in New York and Washington, D.C

Charlene Khoo

Program Director

Pronouns: She/Her or They/Them
Email: charlene@nlgsf.org
Phone: 415-285-5067 Ext. 101

Charlene Khoo joined NLGSF in 2018 with extensive experience as an organizer with Critical Resistance and Asians4BlackLives, fighting for racial justice, gender justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex. She has a background in non-profit administration and fundraising and has worked at organizations including the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco SPCA and San Francisco State University.

Charlene previously worked in the anti-violence field as a case manager and advocate for survivors of domestic violence and trafficking. She received an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University.

Marcelena Menard

Membership Coordinator

Pronouns: They/Them
Email: marcelena@nlgsf.org
Phone: 415-285-5067 Ext. 102

Marcelena joins NLGSF with experience in membership led organizations and is most interested in data analysis as it pertains to organizational assessment and strategy. Their work is motivated by their values of equity, access, and liberation for marginalized people.

Outside of NLGSF, Marcelena works toward building alternatives to incarceration through transformative justice and organizing to abolish the prison industrial complex.

Marcelena is a recent graduate and received their MPP from Mills College.

Brenna Showalter

Law 4 the People Intern

Pronouns: She/Hers
Email: brenna@nlgsf.org

Brenna is the current Law 4 the People fall intern. She has a bachelors degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley, with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. She is looking to pursue a career in legal work within the nonprofit sector, and is passionate about learning and disseminating information on how the law can protect at-risk communities. She hopes to gain on-the-job experience of social justice and human rights law through this internship with NLGSF.

Yalda Saii

Law 4 the People Intern

Pronouns: She/Hers
Email: yalda@nlgsf.org

Yalda is one of two Law 4 the People summer interns. She is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Sociology at UC Davis. She is interning with the Lawyer’s Guild this summer to gain a deeper understanding of how law and policy can be used as tools to advance social and economic justice, with a particular interest in the relationship between law, race, and capitalism.