Veronica Garibay
Co-Founder and Co-Director, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability , Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability
Veronica Garibay co-founded and co-directs Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a community-based advocacy organization headquartered in Fresno, California with offices in Coachella, Bakersfield, Merced, and Sacramento. Leadership Counsel was launched in 2013 with the goal of using a variety of tactics including organizing, community engagement, local policy advocacy, state policy advocacy, and legal advocacy to work in partnership with community leaders to address some of the most intractable barriers to health, well-being, and opportunity including discriminatory land use patterns, unjust climate policy, exclusion from municipal services including safe drinking water and wastewater service, inadequate and unsafe housing, and outdated and inequitable transportation systems.
Garibay was born in Michoacan, Mexico and grew up in the small farmworker city of Parlier in Fresno County, California. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in public administration at Fresno State while working at California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.
For more on how the Leadership Counsel works with rural communities on safe drinking water, watch a short video profile of the Fresno County community of Lanare.