CBLC Welcomes Ben Beach!
We are pleased to welcome Ben Beach as a Staff Attorney with the Community Benefits Law Center. Ben comes to us from the Community Economic Development (CED) unit of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA), the premier legal-aid based CED program in the country. Starting at LAFLA as an Equal Justice Works fellow in 2003, Ben created the Residents' Accountable Development Project, working with organized groups of low-income residents in Los Angeles and Long Beach in their efforts to shape local economic development. His work has included negotiating community benefits agreements, winning inclusion of affordable housing in market-rate projects, negotiating and enforcing local hiring and living wage requirements, and strengthening local redevelopment and planning policy to encourage affordable housing development and local hiring for construction jobs. Ben graduated from NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern public interest law scholar, and clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Berle M. Schiller in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Ben will be starting with the CBLC on July 7, 2008, and can be reached at
CBLC provides legal assistance to community-based organizations, labor unions, and other advocates pushing for economic justice in land use and economic development decisions.
The goal of CBLC is to develop legal tools and strategies that:
- facilitate community understanding of and involvement in major land use decisions, and
- deliver concrete community benefits, such as high-quality local jobs.
Our vision 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, CBLC will assist local attorneys doing community benefits work, maintain a list-serv and a directory of like-minded lawyers, and help lawyers work together on the many legal aspects of community benefits campaigns.