About Us

Our Mission

Californians Together is a coalition championing the academic success and wellbeing of California’s multilingual learners. Working at the intersection of research, advocacy, practice, and policy, we dismantle historic inequities and build an education system where linguistic and cultural diversity is recognized as a strength.

Our Vision

We envision an education system where multilingual learners and immigrant communities are affirmed, supported, and empowered to thrive. Schools embrace linguistic and cultural assets as core strengths, preparing students to graduate ready to lead in a multilingual, multicultural world.

Our Story

Activists that had been involved in the “No on 227” campaign came together for reflection with others who had been deeply involved in the struggle to protect, preserve and further bilingual education in California and to begin to shape strategy for the future.

There was widespread consensus among advocates that one clear lesson from the Proposition 227 experience was that bilingual education advocates needed to be more formally organized and skilled at moving an agenda forward in a political arena. It was clear that a new political coalition and new set of strategies would emerge. In early 1999, six months after Proposition 227 took effect, Californians Together was formed—a new statewide coalition of parents, teachers, education advocates, and civil rights groups committed to securing equal access to quality education for all children. High on the agenda of the new coalition was the need to reinstate bilingual education as an effective program for English learners, and the task of changing hearts and minds about bilingualism and changing the deficiency-oriented and compensatory paradigm about bilingual education to an assets-based perspective.