~200SCHOOL SITES
A districtwide effort reached across San Francisco’s public-school system. Procedures, food-safety guidance, staff training, partnerships, and daily operations had to work as one so a good intention could become dependable practice.
ABOUT JACQUI LOPEZ
EXECUTIVE · SPEAKER · HUMAN SYSTEMS ARCHITECT
Building the connections communities need to thrive.
Jacqui Lopez follows everyday outcomes back to the systems that produce them, then brings people, institutions, resources, and ideas together to shape what becomes possible next.
EXECUTIVE PROFILE
The work begins where life is actually lived.
A dependable commute, a welcoming school, a meal shared without strain, or an idea that finds a path to market may feel like separate experiences. Each is the result of relationships among people, policies, infrastructure, capital, culture, place, and time. Jacqui Lopez’s work makes those relationships visible.
As former CEO and current Chair of Advance Ag Group, an international delegate, and a builder of civic and community infrastructure, Jacqui works across boundaries that institutions often preserve but human lives routinely cross. She listens to the people carrying a system, studies how its parts interact, builds practical infrastructure, and follows the evidence closer to the root.
THE ROOT OF THE PRACTICE
10+
generations of farming
in the Western Hemisphere
Before it became a profession, it was a way of seeing.
Jacqui comes from more than ten generations of farming in the Western Hemisphere. Food was so deeply woven into family life that its larger architecture was easy to overlook: memory carried through a recipe, knowledge held by a grower, labor behind a harvest, and the trust that brings different lives to one table.
That inheritance became a way of reading systems. Begin with what people experience. Look outward to the relationships shaping it. Then build the conditions that allow knowledge, resources, responsibility, and opportunity to move together.
SELECTED IMPACT
The numbers mark where a system touched a life.
Scale alone does not explain impact. Each figure represents people, relationships, and operating structures brought into alignment so a different everyday experience could become possible.
50,000+STUDENTS
The scale matters because every operational decision ultimately arrived in a student’s day: whether food was available, whether it could be shared safely, and whether care could move through a large public institution.
110+FOOD SHARE CARTS
The carts made recovery visible, but the deeper achievement was the system around them. Food that might have been discarded gained a safe pathway to another student through coordination, accountability, and people willing to carry the work.
1,000+YOUNG PEOPLE
Through the Grand National Rodeo Agricultural Education Program, students encountered urban agriculture as something living inside their own city—expanding who could see themselves in the future of growing, stewardship, and food.
CEO → CHAIRLONG-RANGE STEWARDSHIP
At Advance Ag Group, Jacqui moved from building and directing connected agricultural technology as CEO to guiding its next chapter as Chair—a shift from daily operation toward governance, relationships, and enduring impact.
GLOBAL ENGAGEMENTS
As Chair of Advance Ag Group, Jacqui leads its partnership with World Seed Fund and serves within that partnership as Global Impact Fund Partner. The role connects agricultural innovation with a wider commitment to human potential and lasting impact, informed by her work across Southeast Asia, ASEAN, APEC, and the World Bank–IMF Spring Meetings.
Visit World Seed FundA PRACTICE BUILT ACROSS SYSTEMS
From one field of view to the next.
Each chapter expanded the question. What began with technology moved through institutions, schools, cities, markets, and international decision-making—always returning to how the whole is experienced by people.
Technical infrastructure
Jacqui’s work in precision agriculture began with the uncertainty farmers carry: consequential decisions about crops, water, soil, timing, and resources, while essential information remains scattered across incompatible tools. As CEO of Advance Ag Group, she developed a connected farm-and-plant management environment designed to integrate existing equipment, sensors, smart systems, and future AgTech. Now, as Chair, she continues the work through long-range strategy and institutional stewardship.
Institutional infrastructure
The same lens moved from equipment into institutions. Jacqui served on the 2023 founding board of California’s first county Farm Bureau centered on urban agriculture, helping create a formal pathway for growers working inside a city. The work required aligning governance, public agencies, land access, markets, and community knowledge so urban agriculture could participate in civic and economic life.
Systems in service
Through FoodCorps and AmeriCorps service with San Francisco Unified School District, Jacqui worked within a system reaching roughly 200 school sites and more than 50,000 students. More than 110 Food Share Carts helped redirect food that would otherwise be wasted, while work addressing more than 1,000 meals a day showed how procurement, operations, student experience, public policy, and care converge in an ordinary lunch period.
City-scale connections
SF Grown widened the field of view from a single institution to an entire city. The model connects growers, makers, sellers, institutions, and neighborhood access points while using local evidence to identify where fresh-food access is most limited. Food is the visible thread, but the architecture includes transportation, enterprise, culture, purchasing power, and the relationships that allow nourishment, identity, and economic value to circulate closer to home.
The field as classroom
Jacqui carried the inquiry across the United States, tracing where food was grown, transported, sold, and consumed. She observed agricultural abundance and food insecurity existing close together when distribution, purchasing, transportation, and market relationships failed to connect them. The journey sharpened a principle that travels beyond food: proximity does not create access by itself. The quality of the connections determines what people can actually experience.
International perspective
Across a Southeast Asia agricultural delegation and distinct engagements involving ASEAN, APEC, and the World Bank–IMF Spring Meetings, Jacqui has examined how trade, finance, infrastructure, and development decisions enter everyday life. Working across countries reinforces a central truth: thriving cannot be defined at a distance. Culture shapes what people value, how responsibility is shared, which relationships sustain community life, and what an effective system must make possible.
What comes next
Today, Jacqui’s work reaches beyond agriculture into the connected conditions of human life: housing, water, health, mobility, energy, education, finance, and public space. She begins with lived experience, traces the relationships producing it, and brings people across sectors into the same field of view. The goal is not a universal blueprint. It is an architecture that can carry the needs, knowledge, values, and aspirations of the people who will live inside it.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE
The grandmother of grandmothers.
When Jacqui was a student, her school opened its doors to Feed the Needy, part of Father Daniel Madigan’s food bank. At the center of it was an older Filipina-Latina woman whose care reached far beyond the food she served. Some of the students and people who came through those doors did not have grandmothers in their lives. She adopted them as her own. In time, she became known as the grandmother of grandmothers.
The room she created was filled with cheer and people whose lives might rarely have crossed elsewhere. Rich and poor, brown and white, housed and unhoused came to work beside one another. Janitors stood with executives. CEOs ate beside people without homes. Students served hungry mothers and children. No job was beneath anyone, and no person was treated as though they had nothing to give.
When the work was done, nearly one hundred people gathered in a circle for grace and gratitude. Then everyone sat down together and broke bread. Those who had served were served. Those who had arrived in need gave laughter, stories, knowledge, friendship, and care in return. No one left hungry, and everyone left with more than they came.
That room gave Jacqui an early picture of Human Systems Architecture at its best: people, resources, roles, and relationships arranged so dignity could be shared, care could move in every direction, and everyone could belong.
RECOGNITION
Work recognized across agriculture, leadership, and public life.
Jacqui received the inaugural Woman in Agriculture recognition presented by California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, was named National Professional Woman of the Year, and was honored by Marquis Who’s Who. The recognition follows a body of work defined less by one sector than by the ability to connect them.
CONTINUE THE FIELD JOURNAL