Keynote Speakers

Jennifer Splansky Juster, FSG - The Power of Collective Impact
Jennifer Splansky Juster is Director of the fielding-building initiative the Collective Impact Forum, and is a Director in FSG’s San Francisco office. Over the course of her career, Jennifer has worked with a range of foundations, nonprofits, government agencies, and corporations across sectors on issues of strategy, evaluation, and program design. She is one of FSG’s leaders in collective impact field building, has worked on multiple collective impact engagements, designed training opportunities for collective impact practitioners, and frequently speaks on the topic. Jennifer has co-authored multiple publications on collective impact, including the report A Guide to Evaluating Collective Impact and the articles Committing to Collective Impact: From Vision to Implementation; and Essential Mindset Shifts for Collective Impact. Jennifer is also a member of FSG’s Education & Youth and US Health impact areas. She has also worked in the Oakland Unified School District strategic projects group, where she designed a framework for community accountability. Jennifer holds an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University.

Kimberly Aceves, RYSE - Trauma Sensitive Programming for Youth (with Added Anxiety in the Trump Era)
For the past twenty-two years, Kimberly Aceves has been committed to social justice organizing and advocacy efforts that bring voice and power to youth, LGBTQ people, people of color, and working class communities in the Bay Area. Before coming on as the Executive Director for RYSE, Kimberly served as the Executive Director for Youth Together. Kimberly has formerly served on the boards of Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, Horizons Foundation, Youth Uprising, Astraea Foundation and she served as the Advisory Board Chair for RYSE’s planning phase. Kimberly has also been a strong advocate for people of color and youth within the funding community and has served as a community funding panel member of the Women’s Foundation, Horizons Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco Department of Children Youth and Their Families, Astraea Foundation, and the California Mental Health Services Administration. Kimberly has served on Mayor Ron Dellum’s LGBTQ Task Force in Oakland and Mayor Jean Quan’s Oakland Education Cabinet. She is a former Rockwood Leadership Fellow, LeaderSpring Executive Fellow, and most recently a Stanford University Nonprofit Executive Fellow.

Special Guest Speaker

Ann Keller - What is Science For? Becoming a Scientist in an Era of Alternate Facts
Ann Keller is Associate Professor of Health Policy at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Keller holds a PhD in political science and publishes in the fields of public administration and organization theory, health policy, and environmental health policy.  She studies the role of expertise in public decision-making, focusing on how expert systems are designed in the public sector and how expertise is maintained in contested political domains. Among many current research projects, Keller is studying how partisanship is changing norms around congressional funding for policy-relevant scientific research. Her interest in expertise in public policy extends to consideration of non-expert participation in health policy and environmental policy domains. Keller has published on patterns of collective action on the part of patient groups in health policy debates and is currently conducting a comparison of patterns of citizen mobilization in environmental as compared to health system policy arenas. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory; Public Administration Review; the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management; and Risks Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy.  Keller’s book, Scientists in Environmental Policy: The Politics of Objective Advice, won the Don K. Price Award for the Best Book in Science and Technology Politics.