Mayor Jesse Arreguin is the first Latino Mayor of Berkeley, elected in 2016 after serving on the City Council for eight years. He also serves as President of the Association of Bay Area Governments. As Berkeley’s Mayor, he has made addressing homelessness, affordable housing, improving infrastructure and educational outcomes his top priorities.

Wayne Hsiung (he/him) grew up in a small town in Indiana, as the child of immigrants who came to this country with $40 in their pockets. His parents gave him a wonderful life, access to a world class education, and economic opportunities. But Wayne gave up that comfortable life to improve our community, stop climate change, and help those in most need. 

Wayne has been a community organizer for over 20 years. His first experience organizing occurred in the public housing projects of Chicago, under the guidance of the University of Chicago Community Service Center and its then-leader Michelle Obama. He led teams of dozens of students in delivering services to disadvantaged youth. He is a published researcher and leader in the climate movement. Among other things, he has organized campaigns with Greenpeace and Forest Ethics, and he has published research arguing for more aggressive responses to climate change in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  He is currently on the board of the Climate Defense Project, which engages in strategic litigation against fossil fuel corporations and defends activists charged for pro-environment civil disobedience. 

His most noted successes have come as an activist for animal rights. Seven years ago, he co-founded an organization, Direct Action Everywhere, that today has 60 chapters around the world and has mobilized thousands of activists against factory farms. He’s repeatedly confronted some of the most powerful corporations on the planet, risking arrests and prosecutions in the process, and exposed their abusive practices in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He has also led efforts to pass groundbreaking animal and environmental protections, including fur bans in Berkeley, San Francisco, and California. In doing so, he has worked extensively with whistleblower employees who have themselves been victimized by corporate abuses. He is also trained as an attorney and law professor, and he approaches all of his endeavors, large and small, with the pragmatic, strategic approach instilled by that training. This combination of backgrounds — activist and academic  — inclines him to take on huge, transformative projects, and advance them incrementally, step by step, to completion.

Wayne has been challenging corporate power since he arrived at the University of Chicago campus in 1999. Wayne learned from Michelle Obama how to build community, even as low-income communities were being decimated by gentrification. He gave up a prestigious academic appointment and a high paying legal job to expose the abuses of factory farms and other bad-behaving corporations. Wayne has taken enormous personal risks, like lawsuits, prosecutions, and even imprisonment, to bring justice to those who have the least.  

Wayne created immense change, from exposing pathogens in our food to passing groundbreaking environmental and animal protection laws. 

Wayne was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at MIT, studying behavioral economics, and a faculty member at Northwestern School of Law. In that capacity, he co-authored research in 2007 with behavioral economics scholar Cass Sunstein on the  urgency of fighting climate change. He believes in practical and evidence-based solutions and has the background -- both as an academic and an activist -- to put those solutions into effect. 

Wayne has faced off against insurmountable obstacles…. and won. When the factory farming industry passed “ag gag laws” that would ban the publication of photos of animal cruelty, Wayne launched a movement of “open rescue” that has fundamentally transformed the way millions of Americans see food. When the climate movement was stagnating in the mid 2000s, Wayne’s academic research and activism helped trigger newfound attention to the fossil fuel industry’s impact on our planet. And when kids were dropping out of school in the projects of Chicago, threatened by police harassment and street violence, Wayne personally led teams of activists into the projects and helped dozens of kids get back on track. 

Wayne has been challenging corporate power since he arrived at the University of Chicago campus in 1999. Wayne learned from Michelle Obama how to build community, even as low-income communities were being decimated by gentrification. He gave up a prestigious academic appointment and a high paying legal job to expose the abuses of factory farms and other bad-behaving corporations. Wayne has taken enormous personal risks, like lawsuits, prosecutions, and even imprisonment, to bring justice to those who have the least.  

Wayne created immense change, from exposing pathogens in our food to passing groundbreaking environmental and animal protection laws. 

Wayne was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at MIT, studying behavioral economics, and a faculty member at Northwestern School of Law. In that capacity, he co-authored research in 2007 with behavioral economics scholar Cass Sunstein on the  urgency of fighting climate change. He believes in practical and evidence-based solutions and has the background -- both as an academic and an activist -- to put those solutions into effect. 

Wayne has faced off against insurmountable obstacles…. and won. When the factory farming industry passed “ag gag laws” that would ban the publication of photos of animal cruelty, Wayne launched a movement of “open rescue” that has fundamentally transformed the way millions of Americans see food. When the climate movement was stagnating in the mid 2000s, Wayne’s academic research and activism helped trigger newfound attention to the fossil fuel industry’s impact on our planet. And when kids were dropping out of school in the projects of Chicago, threatened by police harassment and street violence, Wayne personally led teams of activists into the projects and helped dozens of kids get back on track.