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Annual Business & Professional Women’s Presentation Featuring Canal Alliance’s Joana Castro Simonini

September 29, 2022 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Free

Please join MCWL for our annual Business and Professional Women’s Presentation,
which will be held as a lunchtime Zoom event this year. This year’s featured speaker will
be Joana Castro Simonini, Managing Attorney at Canal Alliance.  Joana will be speaking
about Canal Alliance’s critical work breaking the cycle of poverty for Latino immigrants
and their families in Marin, including their immigration legal services for unaccompanied
minors and other vulnerable groups, as well as her own experiences as a woman and
mother in the legal profession.

While this is a free event, we invite attendees to donate directly to Canal Alliance to
support their critical work and services: https://canalalliance.org/get-involved/donate/

Joana earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in History, in
2002 and her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2008.
During law school, she worked as an intern and clinical student at Canal Alliance focusing
on U Visa cases. She also worked as a fellow, clinical student and later research assistant
at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Hastings where she gained extensive
experience in asylum law. After law school, and prior to joining Canal Alliance, Joana was
an intern at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague
and worked as a contract attorney for a private firm in Oakland, gaining experience in
removal defense. Joana joined Canal Alliance in December 2014 to assist with the influx
of unaccompanied minors at that time. She has represented children and youth before
EOIR, the asylum office and in their SIJS applications. As a staff attorney, she also
worked on U and T Visas cases, VAWA, Naturalization, DACA, Adjustment of Status and
TPS applications, family petitions and consular processing. Joana became Managing
Attorney in 2017 and directly supervises the attorneys/DOJs and oversees the
department's legal and operational strategies. Born in Brazil, Joana is a native Portuguese
speaker and is fluent in Spanish and English.

Details

Date:
September 29, 2022
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Cost:
Free