Our Staff

Jodi de la Pena
Executive Director
Jodi de la Pena started as our Program Manager in 2017 and then transitioned to the role of Executive Director in 2018. She has over 20 years of experience in social work. She has worked at several agencies assisting refugee populations. She has a Masters in Social Work with 20 years of post graduate work experience, and have worked with Catholic Charities in San Jose to serve the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors before she started working with BRFN. With great coordination and supervisory skills, she has been a great asset to BRFN with supporting our social adjustment counselors and strengthening our working partnerships with other community agencies.

Wah Blu Soe
Social Adjustment Counselor
Wah Blu Soe has several years’ experience as a Social Worker and an Academic Counselor Assistant. He is also experienced in office administration. He is reliable, conscientious, hard-working, and works well with others. His other skills are in computer, including Word, Excel, Power Point, Photoshop, Pagemaker, and FileMaker Database, and journalism. Wah Blu is multilingual fluently in English, Karen, Burmese and intermediately in Thai. He has been with BRFN since 2012.

Bisrat Solomon Abraham
Social Adjustment Counselor
Bisrat Abraham has several years' of varied experience as a Math teacher, an office coordinator, evaluation manager and program officer at International NGOs in her home country Eritrea. Upon arriving as an asylee in the United States, she started almost immediately as a volunteer to assist her fellow community members with navigating the new systems and adjusting to life in the United States. She has a Bachelor's degree in Business Management, and is multilingual in Tigrinya, Amharic, and English. Bisrat started working for BRFN on April 2016.

Lucinda Perez
Social Adjustment Counselor for Refugee Asylee Student Assistance Program
Lucinda is a Nursing student at Holy Names University and was one of the awardee of Gates Millennium Scholar 2015. She has much leadership experience from various community-based programs serving the Spanish speaking and youth communities. She has several years of experience assisting her community with language interpretation and advocacy work. She is one of the few Mam speaking counselors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since April 2016, Lucinda is currently working for our partner organization Oakland Unified School District under the Refugee Asylee Student Assistance Program to provide support to Spanish and Mam speaking students and their families, especially those who are unaccompanied minors.