2024 Featured Speaker

Former Vice President of Innovative Partnerships for Health Equity, Feeding America

 At his core Jerry Jones believes that in order for transformation in communities to occur,  equity work must be steeped in understanding and rooted in love. 
 
For the past eighteen years, Jerry has worked closely with neighborhood-based organizations, healthcare systems and payors, academic research institutions, and philanthropic organizations to weave together a fabric of strategic partnerships in service of reducing inequities in health outcomes with and for people who have been traditionally excluded from and marginalized by the healthcare system.
 
Jerry got his start in health equity as a grassroots community organizer with CCO – Communities Creating Opportunity.  There, he began honing his craft of building bridges between health systems, public health departments and the faith community.  He then went on to serve six years as the Executive Director of the Community Health Council of Wyandotte County before joining Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, where he stood up the Community Health team under the leadership of Qiana Thomason.
 
Most recently, Jerry served as Vice-President of Innovative Initiatives and Partnerships as part of the Research and Innovation team at Feeding America, Jerry and his team support a network of nearly 200 food banks across the nation by leveraging collaboration across multiple sectors, deploying digital technology to transform the charitable food seeking experience as well as testing models for potential scalability and investments which may catalyze a movement towards health equity.