Who We Are

Julian Gross is the Director of the CBLC. Julian has represented coalitions of community-based organizations in negotiation of many ground-breaking community benefits agreements. He has also drafted numerous local hiring and contracting policies, and has worked on living wage policies and many other community economic development initiatives.

Julian attended Boalt Hall School of Law and the University of Virginia. He was a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco – Employment Law Center, where he spent the first four years of his legal career. Julian has authored several publications and articles on community benefits agreements and related advocacy strategies. He is a practitioner in residence at the U.C. Hastings College of Law’s Civil Justice Clinic.
jgross@communitybenefits.org

Ben Beach is a Staff Attorney with the CBLC. He provides legal advice to and advocacy on behalf of local campaigns, negotiating and drafting community benefits agreements, and local, state and federal law and policy regarding affordable housing, targeted hiring, green jobs, redevelopment and health care.

Ben began his legal work in community economic development as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and then Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. He earned his A.B. from Bowdoin College in 1997 and received his J.D. in 2002 from New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar. Upon graduation, he clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Berle M. Schiller in Philadelphia, PA. His writing on community economic development has been published in the Clearinghouse Review and the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, sponsored by the American Bar Association.
bbeach@communitybenefits.org

What We Do

The CBLC provides legal assistance to community-based organizations, labor unions, and other advocates in their campaigns for economic justice. We focus on approaches that ensure good jobs, equitable access to opportunities created by economic development, and improvement in major land use and economic development decisions that affect low-income communities.

Our goal is to build a national network of attorneys with expertise in the community benefits field, giving individual attorneys the ability to share strategies, advise each other, work collaboratively, and build on each others’ victories in communities across the country. To this end, the CBLC assists local attorneys doing community benefits work, maintains a listserv connecting interested lawyers, and helps lawyers work together on the many legal aspects of community benefits campaigns.

See Services for more detail on the work we do.