Kerry Guerin

Kerry (they/she) is committed to making good on the promises of California for all of its residents. Their work has focused on realizing the state’s Human Right to Water, but they have also had the privilege of supporting communities throughout the San Joaquin Valley and Bay Area to achieve other visions of environmental justice. They began their career at Self-Help Enterprises (SHE), working alongside farmworker communities in Tulare, Kings and Fresno Counties to address contaminated and depleted drinking water sources. At SHE, Kerry worked with 15 communities to seek and implement $20,000,000 in grant funding to improve water and wastewater systems, and drafted legislation signed into law by Governor Newsom on drinking water infrastructure. While in law school, Kerry has continued to work on environmental justice issues with Communities for a Better Environment in the East Bay Area and Earthjustice across Northern California. She is honored to play a coordinating role at the direction of local resident leaders in the Allensworth Cemetery Project, which has returned the historic cemetery to the community’s control for the first time in decades. 

Kerry is expecting to graduate with her JD from Stanford Law School in 2023, where she have held a number of positions in environmental and queer and trans organizations, including as one of the co-presidents of OutLaw, the LGBTQ+ student group. She earned her MSc with Distinction in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford; her dissertation explored how farmworker communities were participating or not in collaborative groundwater governance structures in California’s San Joaquin Valley as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was first being implemented. That research, and their time living and working in the Valley on similar issues, inspires Kerry’s ongoing mission: to support historically marginalized communities, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, to advocate for themselves and succeed in their own futures’ creation.