Jilly Stephens Bio

Jilly Stephens, Executive Director, leads City Harvest’s efforts to end hunger in communities throughout New York City.

In addition to overseeing the organization’s core work of food rescue, she has led City Harvest in its increased focus on providing fresh produce and other nutrient dense foods to low income New Yorkers.

Jilly joined City Harvest as Senior Director of Program Development in 2004, where she was key to the expansion of City Harvest’s nutrition education efforts and launch of Fruit Bowl, which provides fresh fruit to preschoolers on an ongoing basis.

Over the past four years Jilly has developed and implemented initiatives designed to address long term issues that surround hunger and positively impact food systems in New York City while ensuring that the immediate needs of hungry New Yorkers are met with emergency food.

Under her direction, City Harvest now delivers nutrition education to individuals, families, and communities in order to help them prevent and manage diet-related diseases, supports low income communities seeking access to high quality, nutritious food, channels a greater amount of local farm food into high need areas, and works to enhance the ability of City Harvest’s agency partners to feed hungry men, women, and children.

Prior to joining City Harvest, Jilly served as the Vice President of Program Operations at ORBIS International, a $25+ million nonprofit organization dedicated to the elimination of avoidable blindness through hands-on surgical training and education. She helped create and lead an organization-wide strategic plan that called for the development of permanent blindness prevention programs in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, China, and Vietnam. Collaborating with various governmental and nongovernmental institutions, Jilly was successful in establishing fully staffed, operational field offices in these five high-need countries.

To arrange an interview with Jilly Stephens,
please contact Tina Posterli or call 516.432.0987

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