Board Member

Pam Tau Lee

Pam Tau Lee is a co-founder of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Chinese Progressive Alliance and Just Transition Alliance, where she is also a board director. An elder with more than 40 years in the fight for social justice, Pam continues this work mentoring and supporting a new generation of young leaders. She is retired after 20 years from the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California at Berkeley and 10 years as an organizer with the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) Union Local 2. Her lifelong movement building efforts are rooted in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she lived in a densely populated single-room occupancy with her grandmother–who worked in a garment factory and was the inspiration of three decades in the struggle for better working and living conditions for people of color and low-income communities. Pam is internationally known for her community-based participatory action research conducted with hotel room cleaners across the U.S. and Canada and San Francisco’s Chinatown restaurant workers. Findings from these studies led to landmark policy changes in the workplace. In 1991, Pam participated in the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and contributed to the Principles of Environmental Justice.

Socials