2025 H2HC Fall Summit: Advancing Health Equity through Innovation and Partnerships

Catherine “Katy” Crosby is NCRC’s Chief of Community Engagement and Institutional Accountability. 

Before joining the NCRC staff in 2023, Katy was Town Manager for the Town of Apex, North Carolina where she led a staff of approximately 600 employees and a budget that exceeded $200 million, and served as the NCRC board chairperson. 

Prior to that, she served as the Chief of Staff to Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz and the City of Toledo, providing leadership to approximately 2,700 employees and overseeing day to day operations which included administering a budget of more than $800 million.

Katy’s expertise includes enforcing local civil rights ordinances in the areas of housing, employment, public accommodation, and credit; overseeing contract compliance and capacity building programs for socially and economically disadvantaged businesses; and community relations programs that focus on immigrant integration, reducing violence, and improving the relationship between the community and police.

She is a member of the Higher Learning Commission board, one of six institutional accreditors in the United States and The Root Cause Coalition, a national coalition of organizations addressing health inequities through cross-sector partnerships. 

Priya Fielding-Singh, PhD, serves as the Director of Policy and Programs at the Global Food Institute, where she leads domestic policy, programming, and engagement initiatives. A trained social scientist, she brings extensive expertise in food and nutrition equity, maternal and child health, and public policy.

Before joining GFI, Dr. Fielding-Singh held roles at the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, working on research and education programs, and served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, where she led a mixed-methods, externally funded research program on health equity. Her work has been supported by funders such as the NIH, National Cancer Institute, Russell Sage Foundation, and Utah Department of Labor, and has been published in top social science, medical and public health journals.

Her first book, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), draws on in-depth fieldwork she conducted with families in the San Francisco Bay Area to explore the complex factors shaping dietary disparities in America. Her insights have been featured in leading outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Fielding-Singh earned her PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship as an National Institute of Health Scholar in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Hunger Free America.

Julie Meyer, RDN, is the Founder of Connection 151, helping B2B business owners connect with (and land!) their most valuable customers through sales strategy and coaching. Julie has more than 20 years of experience in strategic communication, global insights, and stakeholder engagement, including founding and running businesses in both the United States and abroad. She is also the co-founder of AugMentors, a leadership platform that elevates mentoring to help leaders connect more authentically and grow to their full potential, and the founder of Eat Well Global, a highly specialized communications and consulting firm that unlocks business potential and positive impact in food and health. As a B-Corp & Certified Woman-Owned Business (WBENC) and working with growing to globally recognized brands, Eat Well Global is realizing their vision of ‘A world where good nutrition is good business’. Julie is an active member of Chief, a private network of women leaders who support each other in accelerating their careers. 

Julie holds a bachelor of international relations from Tufts University, and a dietetics degree from New York University. 

Gina Plata-Nino serves as the Interim SNAP Director. Previously, she served as a Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition and Agriculture in the Biden-Harris Administration’s Domestic Policy Council, where she helped lead the National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. In this role, she worked with federal agencies and private stakeholders to advance the goal of ending hunger and diet-related diseases by 2030.

At FRAC, Plata-Nino collaborates with the SNAP team to improve the program’s reach and effectiveness for low-income households. She leads legislative and technical support efforts for national, state, and community organizations, as well as government agencies and nonprofits, to strengthen SNAP access, benefits, and customer service.

Before rejoining FRAC, Plata-Nino was a lead advocate at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, where she spearheaded the Hunger Free Campus legislative campaign and addressed food security issues among college students. She also played a key role in passing legislation with the Massachusetts Legislative delegation and worked with both state and federal agencies to eliminate barriers to food access. Prior to her work with MLRI, Plata-Nino managed the Food Security Project, a collaboration between the Worcester County Food Bank and Central West Justice Center, and worked as a benefits attorney, gaining experience with safety net programs.

Plata-Nino began her career by clerking for the Massachusetts State Appeals Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She has received numerous accolades, including being named one of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s Top Women of Law (2022) and receiving the YWCA’s Katherine F. Erskine Award (2021). Gina holds a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law and a B.A. from Montclair State University.

Kim Prendergast is Vice President of Policy & Strategy for Community Care Cooperative (C3), a Federally Qualified Health Center-led Accountable Care Organization (ACO) serving health centers in 7 states. In this role, she leads the ACO’s policy initiatives to support FQHCs to leverage value-based payments and address social drivers of health to improve health equity and health outcomes.  Kim joined the organization in 2019 and has been the architect of C3’s work to build partnerships across the healthcare and social services sectors, designing and implementing their Flexible Services program and expanding their Social Health strategy. Prior to joining C3, Kim spent two decades addressing food insecurity and health with Feeding America through roles in public policy, nutrition programs, and healthcare partnership consulting. Kim is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist with a BS in Dietetics from Purdue University and has a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago.

Daniel Riff is Head of Government & Nonprofit Operations at DoorDash, where he manages its Project DASH initiative. Project DASH enables nonprofits to use the DoorDash logistics platform for local delivery, broadening food access in their communities. Daniel manages DoorDash’s partnerships with Feeding America and dozens of food banks across the country. He is based in Brooklyn.

Rachel Sagor, MD is a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center (BMC), an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, and the Medical Director of BMC’s StreetCred program, a medical-financial partnership that integrates evidence-based, underutilized economic resources and services into routine prenatal and infant health care. She has presented this work nationally, including to the FDIC, the Aspen Institute and at the Health to Hunger Collaboratory, where StreetCred received the 2024 Prize in Innovation. She is the physician lead for BMC’s Primary Care Asthma Team where she has conceptualized, developed and operationalized new initiatives. Dr. Sagor has been BMC’s Pediatric Primary Care Clerkship site director, a Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) resident preceptor, and a field specific advisor since 2016 and is the recipient of many teaching awards. Dr. Sagor was inducted into the BUMG Clinical Excellence Society in 2018

Richard Sheward is the Director of System Implementation Strategies at Children’s HealthWatch. In this role, Richard leads the cross-sector policy work and initiatives of the organization. In close coordination with the Children’s HealthWatch Principal Investigators and Executive Director, he identifies and executes a wide range of projects grounded in research, policy analysis, and advocacy to inform and influence policy decisions that improve children’s health. Richard’s multi-pronged portfolio includes leadership of the Children’s Health Watch Social Vital Signs™ Communities of Practice, as well as strategic and innovative partnerships with other national organizations, researchers, and policy makers to advance the mission of Children’s HealthWatch.

Before joining Children’s HealthWatch, he completed an Education Pioneers Fellowship at Jobs for the Future, where he contributed directly to the organization’s policy research and analysis, and supported the Vice President in scoping out organizational strategy, resource development and external relations. Richard has also focused on organizational development and fundraising as the Grants Manager for the Boston affiliate of the national youth development nonprofit, America SCORES, and as an AmeriCorps*VISTA member in New York to develop the startup operations and fundraising strategy for an eco-civic environmental justice program serving urban youth.

Mr. Sheward received his BA from the University at Albany (SUNY) in English. He received his Master’s of Public Policy from the Heller School at Brandeis University.

Priscilla Wang is a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Medical Director for Primary Care Health Equity at Mass General Brigham (MGB), in the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, leading system efforts to close clinical disparities via its United Against Racism campaign, community health worker interventions, nutrition equity strategy, and behavioral health Medicaid ACO programming. Her work broadly seeks to address structural inequities in health care, and to empower vulnerable patients to effectively navigate the health care system. In the nutrition space, her interest is in developing strategic ways to identify populations affected by nutrition-related health inequities, screening and connecting patients with nutrition-related social determinants of health resources, integrating nutrition into chronic condition programming, and fostering relationships with health system and community-based partners / payers (e.g., Medicaid) to coordinate effective responses in the nutrition equity space.

Emily Yu is the Chief Partnerships and Program Officer at Newman’s Own Foundation. She has over two decades of social sector expertise, including founding AI PRIORI®, a B2B and B2C SaaS platform that helps changemakers identify relevant information across their documents and generate insights for greater impact. Yu also served as the Executive Director of The BUILD Health Challenge® and Managing Director of Partnerships at the de Beaumont Foundation. Her work has resulted in more than 100 new legislative policies, organizational policies, and funding opportunities. In 2024, she aims to strengthen networks working on Indigenous food justice and school nutrition, and to provide children with joyful experiences.