Al Hernandez-Santana ahsantana@csrha.org

Al Hernandez-Santana has many years experience working at the Capitol and statewide on a wide range of health, human services and legal issues. He has many long term contacts in the Capitol with both lawmakers and policy staff.  Al brings strong bilingual and bicultural experience to CSRHA’s staff, and has been a well recognized and respected health and social policy advocate in California since 1995.  Al is well known not only as a policymaking advocate, he is also well known throughout Sacramento and the Bay Area to provide pro bono consultation for underserved communities, including and especially working with Latino issues. Al has worked on policy and resource issues impacting the most vulnerable populations in our state, including undocumented immigrant children. He has a number of years experience dealing with the state’s budget process, especially in the area of ensuring the most vulnerable in our state are protected from costly cuts in government services, especially cuts targeting the homeless, disabled, the elderly, in-home service workers and farm workers. For example, Al was greatly responsible in securing over $9 million in state funding for citizenship assistance.   

Mr. Santana is the former executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, where he conducted various public hearings on mental health, chronic disease and health disparities.  He is co-author of a report funded by The California Endowment, which completed an ethnic health assessment of Latinos in the state.  Before that he represented the Catholic social justice movement upon becoming Director of Hispanic Affairs for the western U.S. He traveled extensively to Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, participating in fair trade missions with Catholic Relief Services. As an Assistant Director for the California Primary Care Association, he was directly involved with clinics serving underserved communities and spent time in the policymaking trenches when the Healthy Families Program was first implemented. He has previous work experience with the California State Assembly Committee on the Judiciary and as a Fellow for Economic Justice at Consumers Union in San Francisco (the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports). 

Drawing upon his years of experience as a policy analyst and legislative advocate, he has appeared on CNN, radio shows, and has been quoted extensively in the Spanish and English media.  Mr. Santana earned his Juris Doctorate (J.D.) from the University of California’s Hastings Law School (1995), and a Master of City Planning from the University of California at Berkeley (1995). He is a veteran, having served with distinction as U.S. Army captain with a tour of duty under NATO near Athens, Greece.

Al Hernandez-Santana is married to Santosh, has two daughters and lives in Sacramento.