OLA Hires Director Of Legal Advocacy

Christine Velia has joined OLA as its full-time director of legal advocacy. In this role, she will be overseeing OLA’s legal and policy advocacy, with a focus on local policies that directly affect immigrants and on observing and monitoring local justice courts, building a network of pro bono attorneys, and working with allies to ensure that East End Latinos receive the legal services they need. She will also support and create long-term strategies designed to create greater equity for East End Latinos and, therefore, a more equitable region for all.

From 2008 to 2022 Velia was the development coordinator and later the development director of Concern Housing. There she was responsible for multiple aspects of supportive and low-income multi-family housing project development and secured over $69 million in capital and program-related public and private grants. She also assisted in developing and opening 764 housing units throughout Long Island and New York City, with another 369 units in various stages of development at the end of her tenure. Prior to working at Concern Housing, she was the minority partner in a title insurance firm in Suffolk County from 1999 to 2008.

Velia earned her law degree from Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in 2022 and her bachelor’s degree in history from Dowling College, where she graduated magna cum laude. While at Touro, she worked as a research assistant and teaching assistant. She interned for the Small Business and Non-Profit Clinic, the Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County through Touro Law Center, and the Immigration Law Clinic.

In 2021 she published “Westwoods and Land Use on Long Island” in the New York Zoning Law and Practice Report, an article that analyzes issues of local land use regulations and the rights of the Shinnecock Indian Nation to control their off-reservation lands on Long Island. In 2013 she received the Leonard I. Saltzman Unsung Hero Award for her volunteer work with the Long Island Coalition for the Homeless. She expects to be admitted to the New York State Bar in 2023.

“From the moment I met Christine, I knew she was a person dedicated to justice and to action,” said OLA’s Executive Director Minerva Perez in a press release. “Her prior work in supportive and affordable housing will be valuable to us. She will help us to continue to support local affordable housing advocates as well as to strengthen our current projects focused on health equity, adolescent mental health access, victim support services, access to direct legal representation, law enforcement’s engagement with Latinos, and school engagement with Latino parents.”

Velia, in the same press release, said, “I am pleased to join a team of passionate and dedicated women and men who work tirelessly to advance equity and inclusion in our communities. So many of us have forgotten our origins because our parents, and maybe even their parents, were born on American soil. But we are a nation and a community of immigrants. And recent immigrants deserve to be treated with the same respect and dignity that we all deserve and expect. I look forward to working with OLA to help strengthen legal advocacy for immigrants on the East End.”