Social Enterprise Project Associate

Stephanie is a dedicated scholar with a passion for psychology and community service, she holds a B.A. in Psychology from Sacramento State University and an A.A. in Psychology from San Joaquin Delta College. Throughout her academic journey, she has actively engaged in research and practical experiences to deepen her understanding of human behavior and contribute meaningfully to society.

At the Department of Psychology, Sacramento State University, she served as a research assistant, spearheading a service-learning partnership between the Renaissance Society and the psychology department. Her responsibilities included conducting research on aging-related needs, analyzing data using HyperResearch, and producing technical reports for executive board members.

Passionate about supporting marginalized communities, she served as a peer mentor for the Pride Scholars Program, offering educational and emotional guidance to LGBTQ+ students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her commitment to community engagement extends beyond academia, as evidenced by her involvement with Active Minds and various social media platforms where she advocates for mental health awareness and inclusivity. Stephanie’s connection to food stems from her family. Her parents were previously farmworkers and that inspired her to give back to her community through food sustainability and support. Fun fact, Stephanie’s favorite vegetable is cauliflower!

Co-Director, Faithful Fools

Leah Laxamana is a community advocate driven by her commitment to make a positive difference at every opportunity. She grew up in the Philippines and has considered San Francisco her second home since 2000.

Leah has worked in the business, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors but her Peace Corps service in Honduras opened her eyes to the power of an engaged community. She feels fortunate to have deepened her ties to the Tenderloin in the last ten years and is currently part of Faithful Fools helping foster our shared humanity and the spirit of abundance.

Leah is a life-long learner, a forever lover of the arts, cooking shows, the outdoors, and also a fun auntie to 15 nephews and nieces.

Sustainability Project Associate

Growing up in Oakland’s Chinatown, Jenny witnessed stark disparities between low- and high-income neighborhoods, which sparked her interest in understanding the systemic factors that influence health and quality of life. Recognizing relationships as the foundation to community building, she pursued a Psychology degree at Northeastern University, where she intentionally chose internships and volunteer work focused on public health and food security (like our partners, City Team and Canticle Farm).

Jenny is bringing all of herself to reduce wasted food to preserve the planet and the dignity of the people we serve, including connecting with the community in Tagalog while rescuing surplus food, and applying her project management skills to edible food recovery regulations. Her favorite moments are those spent collaborating with her team, and creating tangible solutions that serve our clients. If not at Food Shift, she can be found relaxing in nature, connecting with friends and family, and playing video games.

Food Recovery Manager

As the key staff member of Food Shift’s food recovery operation, Robert is responsible for representing Food Shift’s orders and coordinating the food recovery pick up with our partner organizations: selecting the appropriate foods, loading and transporting them back to Food Shift Kitchen for weighing, redistribution, and processing.
Robert also contributes to documenting the food recovery program procedures from the partners’ point of view, to communicate the key points and incorporate these insights into the curriculum.

Senior Fellow, Aspen Institute

Kirsten S. Moy is a practitioner member of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at Waterloo University as well as a long-time Senior Fellow with the Aspen Institute. Kirsten consistently seeks to work with and support organizations with an ecosystem perspective, such as Food Shift. Her current research, which was jump-started by research conducted for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco as a Visiting Scholar, focuses on complexity science and its application to community development.

Kirsten served as the first director of the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund, a program created in the U.S. Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration to provide capital to community-based financial institutions offering services to communities underserved by traditional banks. Prior to joining Treasury, she designed products for pension funds and other institutional investors to invest in affordable housing and other community facilities. While at the Aspen Institute, Kirsten directed a multi-year initiative for the Economic Opportunities Program to assist nonprofits in achieving greater scale through the creation of two platforms (the Asset Platform and the Earned Income Tax Credit Platform) for asset building in lower-income communities.

Kirsten currently serves on the board of Island Press, a nonprofit publisher focusing on the environment, ecology, and the human built environment.

Artist-in-Residence

Colin is a student of culture and history exploring how art can be used as a tool of community power. Born, bred, and based in San Francisco in Ramaytush Ohlone territory, Colin works as a public servant for the City and County of San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and as a volunteer with local organizations like Food Shift and the historic Asian American arts center Kearny Street Workshop. Colin’s grandfather was a Toisanese migrant to the United States who worked as a ship’s cook and was active in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union; it is this relationship between food, labor, and political struggle that Colin takes into his work on the Food Shift Cookbook.

Nonprofit Communications and Fundraising

A serial nonprofit volunteer, with over 30 years of nonprofit experiences ranging from community outreach, curriculum development, teacher-training, fundraising, event planning, writing/editing, project management and cross-sector collaboration, Lia offers Food Shift a broad perspective as a volunteer advisor/writer/editor. She has a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Washington and did graduate work in geography and education. In past lives she worked for the Consulate General of Japan, Universität Stuttgart, Stanford University Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, and launched Hillsborough Neighborhood Network, among others. She co-founded Bay Area Border Relief and volunteers with Slow Food East Bay, Protect Our Defenders, Jackie Speier for Congress, and Earthquake Country Alliance Bay Area, always gravitating towards nonprofits powered by people who don’t back away from doing the real work of improving their communities.

Vice President, Head of Marketing and Partnerships, Human Rights Campaign

Kelli extends more than 20 years of experience managing global brands and global marketing/advertising. Kelli is a creative marketer whose passion is bringing people and ideas together to address some of the world’s most challenging social, economic, and corporate issues. Currently, Kelli leads marketing for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ equality. Prior to her current role with HRC, Kelli spent five years at Apple where she pioneered the strategic and creative development of value based communications across the company. Kelli led the Marcom team that helped Apple find its public voice around the values it holds dear: environmental responsibility, accessibility for people with disabilities, privacy, education, supplier responsibility, and inclusion and diversity.

Founder, Travonde, Inc.

Tina Choi is the CEO and Founder of Travonde, Inc. (Tra-VAHN-day) with the mission to enrich the lives of older adults — starting with education, leisure, and activities. Travonde is a targeted and personalized community platform for education, activities, wellness, and health that focuses on older adults and their families. She believes that we’re still in the beginning stages of a remarkable era in personal technology — and her mission is to harness the power of technology to empower everyone.

An MBA graduate from Cornell University, Tina spent more than a decade with Apple Inc. in global operations strategy roles overseeing $500 million in program spend. She worked on Apple’s most iconic products such as iPod, iPad, and iPhone — winning several awards for her work. She championed many Diversity and Inclusion initiatives while chairing one of Apple’s Diversity Network Association groups, and she co-founded the Apple Entrepreneur Camp.

Tina actively volunteers her time with nonprofit organizations and courses at Cornell University. She’s an Investor and Advisor for Astia, an international network of angel investors dedicated to women-led, high-growth ventures that provide their inclusive teams with unparalleled access to capital.

President, Peninsula Humane Society and SPCA
Former Chair, Governance Committee, Booker T. Washington Center (San Francisco)

Anthony serves as President of Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA (PHS/SPCA) in Burlingame, California. PHS/SPCA is one of the most innovative animal welfare organizations in the country, saving more than 5,000 animals’ lives each year. With more than 25 years of experience as a senior executive in nonprofits and foundations, Anthony has an acute knowledge of how organizations work, where the tension points are, and how to navigate through challenging transitions. He has spoken at national philanthropy and nonprofit conferences on the topics of succession planning, improving board governance, and various perspectives to increase equity, justice, and inclusion in hiring senior leaders. Previously, he served as an executive search and management consultant to nonprofits and founded and ran Blueridge Advisors, a national consulting firm that provided coaching, succession and transition planning, and executive search services to nonprofits.

Emeritus Chef and Culinary Director, Food Shift

Suzy Medios graduated from Bauman College as a Natural Chef, and she has a passion for good food that nourishes the body and mind. She has been a food justice activist for many years working with local community farms and food programs. Having worked in all different kitchens from soup kitchens to restaurants, catering coops, and corporate catering, food has been a lifelong passion. Suzy was fundamental in developing the current culinary program at Food Shift, including the Kitchen 101 module, increasing Food Shift’s meal production, crafting menus from recovered foods, and providing a quality workforce development experience for kitchen apprentices. She has moved to Maui to start a farm, to go one step closer to the source of ingredients that have inspired her, and to be inspired by the land. As the heart and soul of Food Shift, we are fortunate to continue to gain from her wisdom at the advisory board level.

Culinary Director

The kitchen has always been a place of joy for Jen, who grew up spending time there with her grandmother, feeding her giant family. Her passion for nourishing others ultimately led her to leave her role at a clean water advocacy nonprofit and journey to the Bay Area to become a Certified Natural Chef at Bauman College. Then came eight fulfilling years of feeding people wholesome meals as an executive chef, teaching holistic cooking and nutrition, and implementing wellness programs. At Food Shift, Jen is responsible for all aspects of the production work: guiding apprentices through their catering internship within our culinary training program, planning selections of food to be recovered, and creating catering menus based on available foods. Jen specializes in devising methods to process foods for future use to keep them out of the waste stream and turning them into artisanal meals for all of our apprentices, staff, and clients.
As part of Operation Together, Food Shift’s COVID relief program that ensures recovered foods reach the communities we serve, Jen oversees food waste reduction efforts and develops culinary curriculum.

Executive Director

With 20+ years of experience as a senior executive, Yuka possesses skills from several domains that are rarely found in the same person: Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI); nonprofit leadership; organizational management; policy/government; innovation strategy; entrepreneurship; and education. She started her career as a physics teacher determined to increase the number of girls taking physics, as it kept their options open for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-based majors, and developed a 2 year Integrated Science experience-based curriculum. After founding two tech-startups, she led the tech-based economic development agency of the State of Hawaii, where she oversaw tech park development and incubation, created policy frameworks, drafted innovation legislation, and implemented entrepreneurship and other business programs, including Innovate HI, as NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership Center Director for Hawaii. Most recently, based on her executive consulting work on JEDI, and her experience with Astia, a non-profit operating globally to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs, she developed an inclusive leadership curriculum for Stanford Continuing Studies. Yuka was born and raised in Japan, and educated in Canada and the U.S. Having spent most of her professional life in Hawaii, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area via Denmark.

As a turnaround expert, Yuka excels at creating roadmaps for organizations and communities at a point of inflection by focusing on comprehensive strategies collaboratively implemented, and mindfully minimizing and navigating financial, operational, and cultural risks. The Food Shift team has successfully navigated several transitions already under her leadership to introduce several new programs including Operation Together, a COVID relief initiative, and a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion curriculum. She holds a BA in Physics from Reed College.