2023 Speakers

Tammeil Y. Gilkerson, Ed.D.

President, Evergreen Valley College

Dr. Tammeil Gilkerson is president of Evergreen Valley College in San José. Evergreen has long been responsive to regional workforce development needs in Silicon Valley and the Greater Bay Area by providing pathways to employment through career education and preparation for transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

Before her current role, Dr. Gilkerson served as the president of Laney College in Oakland, vice president of academic and student affairs at Contra Costa College, and the first diversity, inclusion, and innovation officer for the Contra Costa Community College District. She served as the Academy and Education Policy Director at The Greenlining Institute and in positions at UC Berkeley in the Office of Student Life and the Early Academic Outreach Program. Much of her passion also focuses on how to support greater workforce diversification, addressing persistent gaps in wealth accumulation, equity, and inclusion as strategies for healthy communities.

The first in her family to graduate from college, Dr. Gilkerson holds a bachelor’s degree in history, a master’s degree in counseling with an emphasis in marriage and family therapy and pupil personnel services, and a doctorate in organizational leadership with an emphasis in higher education.

Ian Griffiths

Policy Director, Seamless Bay Area

Ian Griffiths is the Co-Founder and Policy Director of Seamless Bay Area, a not-for-profit project whose mission is “…to transform the Bay Area’s fragmented and inconvenient public transit into a world-class, unified, equitable, and widely used system by building a diverse movement for change and promoting policy reforms.”

Griffiths has worked as an urban and transportation planner for the past 15 years in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. He was previously with BART, Metrolinx (Toronto), Perkins+Will, and AECOM. As a Station Planner at BART, he led long-range station planning projects and oversaw the development of BART's Station Experience Design Guidelines. In 2021, he authored Governing Transit Seamlessly: Options for a Bay Area Transportation Network Manager.

Griffiths holds a master’s in city and regional planning and economic development and urban design from UC Berkeley. He attended Queen’s University where he received a bachelor of arts in political studies and development studies.

Dontae Lartigue

CEO and Co-Founder, Razing the Bar

Dontae Lartigue is CEO and Co-Founder of Razing the Bar, a San José-based nonprofit. The organization believes that relationships are the key to successful youth development and that, through mentorship and housing support, they can help transition-aged youth achieve permanent connections and self-sufficiency.

A native of the San Francisco Peninsula, Dontae was raised in East Palo Alto for the first few years of his life. He entered care at a very early age and has lived most of his life in San José in shelters, group homes, and various foster placements. Fortunately for Lartigue, he had mentors that invested in him. After graduating from high school, he went on to receive his associate degree in liberal arts/social and behavioral sciences from DeAnza College. He then went on to receive his bachelor’s degree in psychology from San Jose State University. Lartigue plans to further his education by attending a local graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in nonprofit management.

Jennifer Loving

CEO, Destination: Home

Jennifer Loving is CEO of Destination: Home, a San José-based nonprofit that advocates for policies and impactful strategies to reduce and prevent homelessness. With more than 25 years working in a variety of shelter, street and housing programs, Loving has spent her career working to solve homelessness in Silicon Valley.

Since being tapped to lead Destination: Home in 2010, Loving has brought together leaders and people with lived experience to implement a collective impact model in Santa Clara County, resulting in well over $1B in new public, private, and philanthropic funding and over 20,000 people permanently off our streets. She has developed and collaborated on numerous innovative models for addressing chronic homelessness, homelessness prevention.

Loving holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management program. In addition to her role with Destination: Home, she currently serves on the Santa Clara County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and is a board member for Somos Mayfair, Silicon Valley at Home and SJ Spotlight.

Bert Robinson

Senior Editor, Bay Area News Group

Bert Robinson is Senior Editor for the Bay Area News Group where he oversees the newsrooms of The Mercury News and East Bay Times. Along with his team, he is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the Ghost Ship fire in 2017. A champion of freedom of information advocacy and demonstrating a deep passion for transparency and open access to essential data, he was awarded the 2019 Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Robinson co-created and authored the pre-Eminent Silicon Valley poll – a cornerstone of Bay Area public opinion.

Robinson joined The Mercury News as a summer intern in 1983 and has reported from San José City Hall, the California State Capitol in Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. before making a move to management, where he has held a variety of jobs overseeing coverage of government and politics and of Silicon Valley’s high-tech businesses, among other areas. He is a graduate of Princeton University.

Egon Terplan

Robert S. Cornish Endowed Chair of Regional Planning and Lecturer in City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

Egon Terplan is a leading expert in place-based economic development, downtown revitalization, regional planning, land use, and transportation policy, and fiscal policy and government reform. He is an advisor to numerous government, civic, philanthropic, and private sector organizations on infrastructure, land use, climate, and economic development. He helped the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development draft the “Roadmap to San Francisco’s Future”, the revitalization strategy for downtown San Francisco.

He is a Senior Fellow in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley and a Nonresident Senior Fellow with Brookings Metro. From 2019 to 2022, Terplan served as the Senior Advisor for Economic Development and Transportation within the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and the California Strategic Growth Council.

Terplan was the Regional Planning Director for SPUR where he led research, education, and advocacy campaigns and has worked for the Mayor of New York. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design with a Master of City and Regional Planning and holds an undergraduate degree Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College.