Leadership for a Clean Energy Future
Over a decade of grassroots leadership advancing accountability, equity, and clean energy solutions
Our Vision
A Central Coast where thriving communities, youth leadership, and a healthy environment are not exceptions – they’re the standard.
Our Purpose
CFROG is a Ventura County-based advocacy organization leading a just transition away from fossil fuels to protect our health, economy, and climate.
Our Values
Our Story
In 2013, a group of local residents got wind of proposed oil drilling in their neighborhood. Concerned about health and environmental hazards, they researched the impacts of local drilling operations – only to discover that hard data was not available to the public. Ventura County desperately needed an organized effort to monitor oil and gas drilling, and advocate for policies that protect the environment and public health.
Over the last 10 years, CFROG has gained a growing and more diverse team, coalition partnerships across the region and state, significant policy and watchdogging wins, and multiple programs expanding across the energy transition advocacy space.
Meet Our Team
Brooke Balthaser
Community Organizing Manager
Community Organizing Manager
Brooke Balthaser
Brooke Balthaser joined CFROG in 2024 as the Community Organizing Manager. Brooke grew up in the Bay Area but recently moved to Oxnard and has been enjoying getting to know her new community and environment.
Brooke is a graduate from the University of California Santa Barbara with a B.A. In Political Science as well as a minor in Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice. During her undergraduate education, Brooke had a focus on environmental justice, sustainability, and climate policy, fostering a passion for addressing issues within the intersection of social and environmental injustices. Brooke strives to be a catalyst for positive change and to ensure that every voice is heard in decision-making processes.
Outside of work, Brooke enjoys going to the beach, listening to music, traveling, thrifting, and visiting family and friends.
Haley Ehlers
Executive Director
Executive Director
Haley Ehlers
Haley Ehlers has been with CFROG since 2021, working diligently to grow our impact, team, and base of community activists. A resident of West Ventura, she brings experience in cross-cultural community organizing, fundraising, nonprofit administration, and political science.
Haley has a M.S. in Political Science, Applied Community and Economic Development from Illinois State University and a B.B.A from Pacific Lutheran University. She served as a community economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps in Timor-Leste, worked alongside a rural savings and loans cooperative, and initially became mobilized into fossil fuel accountability work.
Abrah Steward
Program Manager
Program Manager
Abrah Steward
Abrah Steward joined CFROG in 2023 as the Program Manager. As a longtime resident of Ojai, she is very excited to deepen her engagement in community environmental issues across Ventura County.
Abrah is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley with Bachelor’s degrees in Society & Environment and Conservation Resource Studies, concentrating in environmental policy and agricultural sciences, respectively. She is passionate about uniting science and policy to inform impactful environmental legislation.
She has served as a board member for the California Public Interest Research Group’s Berkeley chapter and the Director of Policy at the Berkeley Student Food Collective, in addition to working as a researcher, farmer, and environmental consultant.
When she’s not working, Abrah enjoys knitting, playing music, baking, and spending time with her dog, Bean!
OUR LEADERSHIP
Meet our Board of Directors and Advisory Board who lead our work with incredible expertise and community-based knowledge.
What Our Community Says About Us
Kathleen W.
Community Leader
Alex M.
“Working with the Environmental Voices Academy [...] showed me that environmental issues are not only about individual actions like recycling. Environmental issues are deeply tied to and impact people and communities in uneven ways. The academy showed me what’s going on in Ventura County, like the West Ventura community’s fight for clean air. It also fostered spaces for young people like me to take action.”
Youth Leader
Gordon C.
“CFROG is a leading force in our local struggles to replace oil and gas and mitigate their harms in our Ventura County. [...] CFROG monitors oil and gas pollution and provides meaningful scientific data to educate community members, advocates and decision makers in our area. CFROG’s actions to protect the health of impacted low-income communities of color brings many people together to work for climate justice."
Volunteer
Avrey T.
“I really enjoyed my time with CFROG. I think that it was definitely an eye opening experience for me and opened the doors to more of a sociological based kind of side of environmentalism, which I found a lot more interesting. It introduced me to the more activism side of things."
Avrey T.
EVA Alumni
Our Trusted Community Partners
Land Acknowledgement & Indigenous Just Transition
We acknowledge that we engage on the traditional land of the first people of Ventura County, the Chumash People past and present and honor with gratitude the land itself and Chumash indigenous communities.
The land that Climate First: Replacing Oil & Gas (CFROG) works on has been the home to the Chumash indigenous communities for more than 15,000 years. Please join us in honoring these ancestral groups by expressing gratitude for the people who stewarded this land throughout the generations and continue to do so.
For thousands of years, Chumash communities have been caretakers of this environment. The climate crisis is a legacy of colonialism; rooted in the exploitation and degradation of the planet, peoples, and cultures. Many of CFROG’s staff and board members are settlers on this land as a result of this same colonialism. Indigenous leadership, knowledge, and innovation is critical to fighting fossil fuels and the transition to a just and sustainable economy. We celebrate the resilience and strength that all indigenous people have shown and continue to show on the Central Coast and beyond in the face of systemic injustice.
CFROG supports the Platform in Support of an Indigenous Just Transition and holds a commitment to the rights, sovereignty, and leadership of Indigenous Peoples. Our fight for climate justice is inseparable from Indigenous justice – and our movement must reflect that truth in action.
Learn more about this affirmation created in partnership with the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Last Chance Alliance here.
#WE NEED YOUR HELP
Please join us in fighting for a livable future on California’s Central Coast
“I have witnessed firsthand CFROG’s courage and fortitude in taking on formidable vested interests while fighting for a clean energy future in which all can thrive. CFROG’s mission, and the way they go about pursuing it, give me hope.”