CHAIR

Susan Sandler is a philanthropist and political donor. She was the first and largest donor behind the independent efforts to support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She was also the lead investor in the independent activities supporting Kamala Harris’ 2010 campaign for California Attorney General and Cory Booker’s 2013 election to the United States Senate. She is a national leader in education reform and has served as a board member of several progressive non-profit organizations including the Democracy Alliance.

PRESIDENT

Steve Phillips is a writer and author of the New York Times bestselling book, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. He is a national political leader and civil rights lawyer who, in 1992, became the youngest person ever elected to public office in San Francisco and went on to serve as president of the Board of Education. He has written for numerous newspapers and magazines across the country, and is a regular opinion contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for The Nation magazine. He is founder of the social justice media organization, Democracy in Color.

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL

Emi provides legal and strategic advice to the founders of the Sandler Phillips Center, manages outside counsel, and is responsible for all legal matters and operations associated with the Center’s activities. With over 20 years of legal experience, Emi litigated a broad array of employment and commercial matters in private practice. She was a trusted adviser to clients large (including companies in the Fortune 500) and small, in the nonprofit and for profit sector, representing a wide range of industries from healthcare to tech. She regularly defended clients in investigations by state and federal agencies, and conducted scores of trainings, understanding that education was key to achieving compliance.

Emi has a long-standing commitment to public service. She was President of the Asian American Bar Association, one of the largest minority bar associations in the country, from 2012-2013. Active in civil society, she served on the Immigrant Rights and Ethics Commissions for the City and County of San Francisco. Appointed to the Ethics Commission in 2004, she chaired the Commission for two years before her term concluded in 2010. During her tenure, she oversaw a dramatic increase in the staff and budget, which allowed the Commission to expand its public and municipal education programs, and to fulfill its mandates.

Emi is a 2010 recipient of the Best Under 40 Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and a 2013 recipient of Minority Bar Coalition’s Unity Award for her longstanding work to increase diversity in the legal profession and in the judiciary.

Emi holds a BA degree from UCLA, and a law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law.

DIRECTOR OF THE WASHINGTON OFFICE/CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST

Dr. Martínez Ortega was voted one of Top 50 Influencers in US Politics by Campaigns and Elections Magazine for her work on the 2014 Fannie Lou Hamer Report, the first ever outside audit of Democratic Party spending. She is a national leader in progressive politics and policy, and an expert on the New American Majority (progressive whites and progressive people of color), organized labor and employment matters, and health care policy. She has undertaken landmark research for numerous leading national foundations, major donors, the federal government, and labor unions on a variety of issues, including mapping the new electorate, targeting and modeling progressive voters, protection and enhancement of workers’ rights, health care access, quality and equity, and economic policies that mitigate income inequality.

She served as Senior Advisor to the Democracy Alliance on research and data about voter behavior and has advised its Latino Engagement Fund as it developed a research agenda and quantitative metrics for the program work conducted by its grantees. As Research Director at American Rights at Work she led all aspects of the advocacy organization’s research efforts. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Health and Human Services where she designed and implemented cutting-edge quantitative research on race, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, and language use in the area of health care cost, finance, and access.

Dr. Martínez Ortega is a Tejana from South Texas. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in human biology (with a concentration in health policy) as a first-generation college student, earned a law degree from UCLA, and a PhD and master’s from the Heller Graduate School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her dissertation, “Health Insurance Enrollment Patterns of Mexican American Children,” won the Minkoff Prize in Health Economics.