UCIMM Executive Director Blanco Receives Chancellor's Award for Diversity and Community

May 23, 2022

UC Immigrant Legal Services Center Executive Director María Blanco is the recipient of a 2022 UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. Chancellor Gary S. May held a reception at his residence earlier this month to recognize this year's recipients.

The Chancellor's Achievement Awards for Diversity and Community were established to honor achievements that contribute in substantial ways to the development and well-being of the diverse and evolving UC Davis community. UC Davis faculty, staff, and students, and local community members are eligible for an award in any of the following categories:

Exemplary service that embodies the Principles of Community through outstanding leadership in areas of social and/or cultural understanding, local or regional community involvement, and/or collaborations leading to increased knowledge or expertise in areas of special interest to the campus;
Outstanding efforts toward achieving and/or advancing a diverse and principled academic community, including exemplary service in the areas of student, staff, and faculty recruitment and development;
Exemplary scholarship having a major impact on community and diversity; * Exemplary contributions to the success of campus-based outreach efforts; * Exemplary service to the campus and/or community through active leadership, involvement in pre-college partnership initiatives, etc.

Blanco, who will retire in June, is the founding executive director of the Immigrant Legal Services Center. The first of its kind in the nation, its innovation is to bring immigration services directly to the campuses to ensure retention and graduation of first-generation students.

Blanco’s primary areas of expertise are employment law, civil rights law and policy, voting rights, education law, and immigration law and policy. With one foot in legal academia and the other in legal practice and policy, she has been at the head of premier legal organizations whose mission is access to justice and advancing constitutional rights for all. She was a lead lawyer in a seminal case that extended Title VII law to undocumented workers in California, and in another employment case, represented the first group of women in history to enter the San Francisco Fire Department. She served as a commissioner on California’s first Independent Redistricting Commission, which produced congressional and legislative maps after the 2010 Census.

Blanco was appointed to the education transition team for President Obama in 2009, where she reviewed the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. She serves on the boards of the California Endowment, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Centro Legal de La Raza in Oakland, and until recently, the Public Policy Institute of California. She earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.