Ben Beach

he/him

Legal Director

Oakland. CA

Ben gives PowerSwitch Action and our movement legal, policy and strategy tools to transform our communities. He leads the organization’s legal team, coordinates a network of allied attorneys and legal scholars, and provides legal advice and representation to the PowerSwitch Action network.

Ben learned to believe in the power of people’s collective action to improve lives and society while working for the late great U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as an intern. Ben spent his first law school summer working alongside community workers in Salinas, CA who had organized with Cesar Chavez and became inspired by the potential of law and organizing to bring about meaningful change.

Prior to joining PowerSwitch Action, Ben was an Equal Justice Works Fellow and later staff attorney at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, where he pioneered efforts to give communities more power over economic and land development in their neighborhoods. He helped win pathbreaking agreements to provide affordable housing, access to jobs, living wages, and other community benefits. He also solved LA’s traffic problem by regularly riding his bike to work.

Ben has taught Community Economic Development at UCLA School of Law, served as a Truman Fellow, and worked in legislative affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Ben has spent over a decade at PowerSwitch Action and thus has the important job of occasionally recounting the organization’s “ancient” history, such as printed reports and old bad logos. He has supported numerous campaigns for community benefits agreements, community workforce agreements, and other tools that allow BIPOC and other impacted communities to ensure economic development and land use meets their needs. He has worked closely with pioneering city-level campaigns that have made whole industries better for workers and communities, like LAANE’s Don’t Waste LA campaign and Revive Oakland’s campaign for good jobs and equity at the Oakland Army Base logistics and warehousing project. He helped successfully defend an Oakland ballot measure establishing the City’s office of labor standards enforcement. Additionally, he has helped develop PowerSwitch Action’s campaign to challenge corporate-driven state interference.

Ben holds an AB from Bowdoin College and JD from NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Law Scholar. He served as a law clerk to a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He has written, taught, and spoken widely on community economic development, community benefits agreements, housing and land justice, and state preemption. He has served on Berkeley’s planning commission.

Ben lives in the Bay Area with his partner, daughter, and four cats. He enjoys exploring nature, raising butterflies, learning martial arts, strumming a guitar, and playing soccer.