The CCSF Board of Trustees is composed of seven members elected by the voters of the Community College District and a student representative. The Board of Trustees assumes full responsibility for the general control and direction of the San Francisco Community College District.
President
bdavila@ccsf.edu
Brigitte Davila has served on the City College Board of Trustees since 2015. Dr. Davila lives in, works in, and loves San Francisco. She is originally from Los Angeles with roots in Colorado and New Mexico. She came north to study at UC Berkeley and earned a B.A. in Rhetoric and J.D at Berkeley Law. Dr. Davila has taught in the Raza Studies Department at San Francisco State University for the last eighteen years. Among her classes are Government & Constitutional Ideals, Community Organizing, Critical Thinking, and Community Law. Currently, her area of focus is political education and policy, with an emphasis on community activism.
Dr. Davila serves as a member of the California Faculty Association’s statewide Political Action and Legislation Committee.
Vice-President
jrizzo@ccsf.edu
John Rizzo was first elected to the Board of Trustees in November 2006. He currently chairs the Board's Facilities Committee and serves on the Board's Budget Committee. He previously has served as Board president.
As Facilities Chair, John Rizzo works to ensure that the $845 million voter-approved Proposition A projects meet the needs of current and future students, and are completed on time and on budget. These projects will replace dilapidated old buildings with state-of-the-art teaching facilities with a low carbon footprint.
On the Budget Committee, John has pursued responsible budget solutions in a time of COVID-induced nationwide enrollment decline.
John is also a member of the Standards Review Team of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC). The Team is tasked to review drafts of the next version of accreditation standards and to recommend edits.
John is a climate advocate with the Sierra Club who received a commendation from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for his work promoting green energy. At City College, he pushed to create the Sustainability Plan and championed the use of renewable geothermal power at the Ocean Campus.
John served as a commissioner on the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority, where he worked for improvements to public safety, the lowering of speed limits in the park, and the creation of crosswalks and bicycle lanes.
John is the author of 14 books about computer technology and worked for many years as a technology journalist. He was the publisher and editor of the MacWindows web site. He has also taught adult education and has written educational materials. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Rutgers University.
Aliya Chisti was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2020. She is the first-Muslim woman to hold an elected position in the history of San Francisco. She was born and raised in San Francisco and is a graduate of San Francisco’s public schools.
Aliya is an educator, advocate, and policy analyst. Her deep commitment to education stems from her experiences overcoming barriers to pursue her academic dreams. She is a former educator and has over a decade of experience working in schools or on policies that impact schools. She also has experience in advancing policies to improve educational equity at the local and federal levels.
She earned an M.A. in Education Policy from Columbia University, where her thesis emphasized the need for higher education reform to reduce the student debt burden on college students. In 2016, Aliya was nominated by the U.S. Department of State as a Fulbright Scholar to teach English and study higher education policy in North Macedonia. She holds a B.S. in Nutrition Science from the University of California of Davis.
Aliya is excited to serve the City College community and welcomes comments and feedback at achisti@ccsf.edu.
Dr. Green was born and raised in San Francisco’s Western Addition and is an educator with extensive experience in higher education.
He has years of experience working within the California Community College system. He began his career as an adjunct counseling faculty at Skyline College in 2006, later transitioning to City College of San Francisco, where he served as a financial aid academic counselor. Upon moving to Southern California, Green became a tenured faculty member and department chair at West Los Angles College before moving back to San Francisco where he served as an administrator at Merced College.
Since 2021, Dr. Green has served as the Dean of Academic Counseling and Student Services for West Valley College, where he coordinates various student services programs with a focus on individual educational goal completion for transfer, degree attainment or certification.
In addition to his work as a college administrator, Dr. Green serves on a variety of higher education boards, including the African American Male Education Network & Development Program (“A2MEND”), Black/African American Advisory Panel of the California Community Colleges, and is also an active member in the San Francisco community serving on the Board of Directors of the Alive and Free/Omega Boys Club and the Bayview YMCA.
Thea Selby was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2014. Trustee Selby served as Board Vice President in both 2015 and 2016, and Board President in 2017. Trustee Selby is eager to work with the board to continue City College’s accreditation, to increase enrollment, and to move City College forward towards a sustainable, equitable, and accessible educational institution.
When Thea and her family moved to the Lower Haight 1999, she became concerned with safety issues with her neighborhood and co-founded the Lower Haight Merchant + Neighbor Association to fight for a safe and inclusive neighborhood. To activate the neighborhood and to help the merchants, she developed quarterly ArtWalks, spearheaded a block-long mural with over 30 muralists, and helped raise $50,000 to create a 10’ bronze Silly Pink Bunny in the 440-unit development 55 Laguna.
To learn more about how government and large capital infrastructure projects worked, she applied and was appointed to a position on Citizen’s General Obligation Bond Oversight Committee and served as its Chair. During her tenure, she increased the number of times the committee met to oversee $7B of city bonds and established subcommittees by bond for better oversight.
As a mom with kids and no car, she depends upon Muni to get around. She was one of the first members of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union (www.sftransitriders.org) and is the current interim Chair. She fought for Free Muni for Youth and recently worked with a coalition of groups to pass a $500M transportation bond, and a measure that requires Muni funding to grow with the population. Building on her experience with large capital projects and transportation, she applied and was appointed in 2014 to the state-wide California High-Speed Rail Authority, the governing body for the $68B infrastructure project that will bring High-Speed Rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
In the midst of this, she continues to fight for women. She is a former board member of the SF Women’s Political Committee (SFWPC) and co-wrote legislation with then-Supervisor David Chiu that would make the Mayoral appointment process more open and transparent to encourage a more diverse range of applicants for appointments to commissions and committees. She is co-founder of Exceptional Women in Publishing (www.ewip.org), and started the annual EWIP Women’s Leadership Conference for women in media 7 years ago in San Francisco. She is a proud 2010 graduate of Emerge, a program that teaches Democratic women to run for political office.
Trustee Selby is the Principal of Next Steps Marketing, a call-to-action digital marketing company that builds and engages audiences. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Soviet Studies and received her MBA from the University of Oregon in International Business and Marketing. She is married and has two children soon to go to college.
Shanell Williams is the Director of Community Engagement for the California Preterm Birth Initiative at UCSF and a member of the Board of Trustees at City College of San Francisco. Over the past 20 years, Shanell has served thousands of San Franciscans as an informed, passionate and dedicated public advocate, nonprofit leader and community organizer. From mentoring youth trapped in cycles of incarceration—to saving city college from a near loss of accreditation and closure for the past eight years— Shanell has worked tirelessly to improve all San Franciscan’s quality of life. She has worked for numerous nonprofit agencies and labor organizations dedicated to serving marginalized, low-income communities such as: the Center for Young Women’s Development, Youth Leadership Institute, UNITE HERE Local 2, Jobs with Justice SF, and Urban Services YMCA to name a few.
Shanell is a 2005 Jefferson Award recipient and was honored for her work in co-founding Youth Treatment and Education Court Leadership Fellows, as she helped develop a curriculum to train court administrators, judges, probation officers and thousands of service providers nationwide in culturally competent treatment for youth in the system. She also received the 2013 San Francisco Bay Guardian Local Hero Award for her CCSF advocacy, as well as the Harvey Milk Democratic Club’s “City College Champion” Award in 2014. Shanell is a graduate of Women’s Policy Institute, the Women’s Initiative for Self-Employment, an Emerge California 2016 alumna, and has served on the San Francisco Youth Commission, the Juvenile Justice Commission and other community boards.
Alan Wong was born in San Francisco, California. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, San Diego and a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco. Wong’s career experience includes working as Education Policy Advisor for San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar and as a union organizer for homecare and healthcare workers.
Wong’s community service experience includes serving as a delegate for the San Francisco Labor Council. He has also served on leadership panels for the following organizations:
Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, San Francisco Chapter;
American Red Cross, Bay Area Chapter; and
Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs, San Francisco Chapter.
