MIYE GOISHI: STATEWIDE HONOR AS MOST VALUABLE BOARD MEMBER

For more than a decade, Miye Goishi has lent her vision and expertise to the Boards of The Public Interest Law Project (PILP) and the Child Care Law Center (CCLC). On June 9, 2011, the Legal Aid Association of California honored Miye’s dedicated years of service at a San Francisco awards ceremony. Michael Rawson, Co-Director of the Public Interest Law Project, and Melissa Rodgers, Directing Attorney of the Child Care Law Center, presented Miye with the Award of Merit.Miye Goishi is a long-time member of the Bay Area public interest community. She began her legal career specializing in housing work at Legal Aid of Marin and Contra Costa Legal Services Foundation. In 1992, after 11 years, Miye joined the UC Hastings faculty, and in 2008, became the Director of Hastings’ Civil Justice Clinic, where she has mentored countless students committed to public interest law and social justice work. Her students have greatly benefited from her wisdom.As president of PILP’s Board for 15 years, Miye oversaw the founding of the organization and guided it from a two-attorney program to the seven attorney statewide support center it has become. Miye saw the crucial importance of cultivating a network of state-wide support centers to sustain and catalyze the efforts of local legal services offices. She and other PILP board members helped us chart our course to become the well-established and valued resource for local programs that we are today.As member of the Child Care Law Center Board, Miye presided over one of the most tumultuous periods of that organization’s 25-year history. In late 2009, the recession forced CCLC to close. However, under Miye’s leadership, the organization not only reopened, but developed long-term strategies for sustainability and reasserted its role in the effort to provide affordable child care to low-income parents statewide. Miye’s judgment and determination united the Board and inspired confidence that CCLC would continue to thrive.Miye Goishi has invested great time and energy in helping to direct and assist PILP and CCLC. It is a fitting tribute to Miye that these two organizations recently combined as co-counsel in a successful lawsuit, preventing last-minute, catastrophic cuts to child care subsidies that would have left the working families of more than 56,000 children without child care. PILP treasures its friendship with Miye, and joins with the Legal Aid Association of California to applaud her work.