Yuka Nagashima
With more than two decades of executive leadership across industries and continents, Yuka Nagashima brings a justice-centered, systems-thinking approach to her role as Executive Director of Food Shift, an organization dedicated to building a more equitable, regenerative, and inclusive food system. Yuka has guided Food Shift through transformational change, evolving its mission from food recovery to food justice that advances climate resilience, livelihood equity, and community self-determination in the Bay Area and beyond.
Yuka’s leadership is grounded in experience across justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI), nonprofit and public-sector management, innovation strategy, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. In Hawaii, where she spent more than twenty years, she founded two technology startups before leading the State of Hawaii’s technology-based economic development agency. There she oversaw statewide technology park development, directed Hawaii’s NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership Center (Innovate HI), and shaped entrepreneurship and innovation policies that prioritized inclusive and sustainable growth. Her work in Hawaii strengthened her conviction that innovation must serve both people and place, a philosophy that guides her work at Food Shift today.
After a period in Denmark, Yuka deepened her understanding of circular economies, cooperative governance, and social welfare systems. Those experiences reinforced her belief that resilient food systems require shared ownership, cross-sector collaboration, and cultural humility.
Yuka also developed and taught an inclusive leadership curriculum for Stanford Continuing Studies, informed by her executive consulting practice and her work with Astia, a global nonprofit focused on gender equity in entrepreneurship. Born and raised in Japan and educated in Canada and the United States, Yuka holds a BA in Physics from Reed College. Her career reflects a lifelong commitment to systemic change rooted in justice, equity, and care for both people and the planet.