Cynthia Billops, VP of Operations, Membership & Belonging at One Step Closer & J.E.D.I Collaborative.

Cynthia Billops, VP of Operations, Membership and Belonging at One Step Closer (OSC)

Cynthia Billops is the VP of Operations, Membership & Belonging at One Step Closer & J.E.D.I Collaborative. She is a business strategy and operations expert who has spent the last few decades planning, designing and launching complex IT, Web and SaaS services. She earned her Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Mills College – focusing on small group interactions and the importance of each individual’s contribution to optimal success. She is an inspired, “human-first” leader of people, projects and organizations and a practiced facilitator – using inclusive practices to build and sustain equitable, diverse, transparent work cultures and has guided multiple leadership teams through periods of great change, accelerating growth and expansion within the constraints of broader economic and environmental challenges.

 

She has experience as Founder, ED, Director, advisor, and Board member; for start-ups, nonprofits and for-profit organizations. Her board experience includes serving as trustee/director for several smaller, social-justice nonprofits as well as co-chairing the Trustees Committee and serving on the Executive committee at Gateway Public Schools (a pair of San Francisco public charter schools whose mission is to “prepare a broad range of learners for success in college and beyond while being specifically committed to serving a student body that reflects the diversity of San Francisco with special emphasis on students with diagnosed learning disabilities.”)

 

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

Food: Justice, Equity, Diversity – Why and how you should care

This Keynote has as its theme “Food Justice” and will provide:

  • A high-level overview of Food Access, globally and in the United States (stats!) including how farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous communities are marginalized and/or seen as “extractive/expendable” cogs within the larger agri-food industrial complex.
  • Insight into historical and ongoing systemic, inequitable distribution mechanics that lead to food insecurity; community instability; environmental harm and degraded health/wellness outcomes.
  • A spotlight on how other, relevant global challenges (e.g. Climate Change; political discord; embedded racist and/or colonialist practices) directly influence and are influenced by food insecurity.
  • Highlighted stories and opportunities from and about individuals and organizations committed to creating and sustaining Food Justice planning and initiatives within their communities.
  • An opportunity to reflect/specify goals + outcomes designed to empower individual members as they consider and align with existing efforts to ameliorate food waste; food desserts; nutritional scarcity.