Patricia G Iwasaki, MSW, is an active member of the Sustainable Food Policy Council since 2013. She has presented on food insecurity, spoken both nationally and internationally on the importance of building academic-community collaborations, engaging in environmental justice, and community-based participatory research. Before joining SFPC, she chaired the Minority Health Advisory Commission, a body that advised the Office of Health Equity and CDPHE.

Patti has a 20+ year history working with low income, immigrants and refugees (in Colorado, California, and along the US-Mexico border) addressing health equity/disparities, capacity building, and empowerment. She taught over a decade as adjunct faculty at DU’s Graduate School of Social Work, specializing in healthcare, work with chronically and terminally ill, and in community practice. While in England, she was lucky to have worked with the Whitehall Stress and Health Study, a longitudinal public health study of government workers. She is a Board Member of Taking Neighborhood Health to Heart/TNH2H, a non-profit doing CBPR in NE Denver, and co-chairs its Data Review and Dissemination Committee. She has a consulting business, a 5-year old Aussie-Border Collie, practices a Japanese “touch”/alternative healing tradition, and is looking forward to more time to do artwork and “shibori (Japanese tie dying).”