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2015 Recipent Dolores Huerta Leadership Award: Emerging Organizers and Leaders

“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” - Dolores Huerta

Cynthia Adriana Gutierrez is an award winning first-generation Nicaraguan Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, doula, cultural strategist and public speaker.

Cynthia was a part of the 2020 UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health Communications and Advocacy fellowship. This fellowship deepened her existing advocacy and work towards documenting the ways women of color have resisted and healed from harm done towards their reproductive autonomy. She is a recent graduate of the prestigious 2021 Rockwood Leadership Institute Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice cohort. Cynthia‘s work has been featured in the New York Times, The Lily News, Elle Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Group.

She is currently the program manager for the University of California San Francisco Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health (HIVE) and Team Lily programs. She is on the Board of Directors for ACCESS Reproductive Justice and the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom. She has a Bachelors in Sociology from the University of CA, Santa Cruz. She is originally from San Francisco’s Excelsior District and now resides in East Oakland with her husband and newborn son.

Certificates & Training

  • Practice in Transformative Action Year-Long Program (East Bay Meditation Center)

  • Placenta Encapsulator (Cornerstone Doula Training)

  • Postpartum Doula (Cornerstone Doula Training)

  • Birth Doula Training (ToLabor)

  • End of Life Doula Training (INELDA)

  • Steering Committee Member of the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Nonviolence (2015-2017)

  • Trainer in Kingian Nonviolence Curriculum

  • Inside Out Writing Project: Facilitator of writing workshops in the Santa Cruz County Jail

  • Certified Rape Crisis Counselor (San Francisco Women Against Rape)

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Lila Watson

Featured In

Awards & Honors

2021 The National Women's Health Network Activist Award

2021 Ob-Gyn San Francisco General Hospital Division STAR Achievement Award

2020 ZSFG Health Commission Employee Recognition Awards (Team Lily)

2019 Organization of the Year Award: Women's March Oakland (East Bay Women's Political Alliance)

2015 Dolores Huerta Leadership Award: Emerging Organizers and Leaders

2010 Latino Educational Association of City College of San Francisco La Raza Award

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“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

Audre Lorde

Conference Presentations

  • Gathering for Justice: Growing up Locked Down Conference

  • American Sociological Association

  • American Public Health Association

  • SisterSong “Oh $hift: Unapologetically Bringing our Hair, Hoops and Hoods to the Workplace”

  • UC Berkeley “Reproductive Justice 101"

  • CityMatch Conference

  • United Nations Association East Bay Chapter

  • Black Millennials for Flint panel on "Black and Latina Maternal Health Crisis"

  • University of California San Francisco Preterm Birth Initiative

  • University of California San Francisco 2020 Latinx Heritage Month Movie Screening of No Mas Bebes and panel