Annual General Meeting of Members
Please join us for the Annual General Meeting of Members. Voting for the Board of Trustees will take place during the event. This year’s meeting will be held as a dinner event. Complimentary parking is available, and beer and wine are included with dinner.
About Our Speaker:
Ambassador Gaddi H. Vasquez is a distinguished public servant and humanitarian leader whose career spans law enforcement, diplomacy, and global development. Born to Mexican-American migrant farmworkers in Texas and raised in California, he became the first in his family to earn a college degree, later embarking on a lifetime of public service rooted in compassion and community. He served as a police officer, a county supervisor in Orange County, and ultimately made history as the first Hispanic Director of the U.S. Peace Corps, where he expanded volunteer diversity and launched key initiatives, including the agency’s presence in Mexico. Later, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, he championed food security and humanitarian aid as instruments of soft power, traveling extensively to support vulnerable communities worldwide. His private-sector work at Edison International and his civic involvement with major institutions underscore his commitment to public good. A recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, Ambassador Vasquez brings profound insight into how empathy-driven leadership can shape international policy and foster global goodwill.
Panelists:
Sonya Stokes is an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine at UCSF School of Medicine, and she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations independent task force on preparing for the next pandemic. During the first wave of COVID-19 in New York City, Dr. Stokes co-authored the mass casualty protocol for evaluating and managing COVID-19 patients in the emergency department at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine where she also served as medical director of the COVID-19 Advisory Group. She was a fellow at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity program, and she serves on the scientific advisory board for the Integrated Bioscience and Built Environment Consortium.
Dr. Stokes received her medical degree from UC Davis School of Medicine, and she completed her fellowship training at Columbia University Medical Center where she also earned a master of Public Health in the program on forced migration and humanitarian assistance. She specializes in health systems strengthening in limited-resource settings with a focus on increasing access to trauma and acute care services in conflict-impacted regions, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan. She lives in San Francisco.
Stefanie Sobol is an award-winning humanitarian strategist with more than two decades of field-based leadership in conflict, disaster, and post-conflict environments. As Senior Humanitarian Advisor in USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, she held full-time postings in Ukraine, Senegal, Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda, directing complex, multimillion-dollar responses to crises and spearheading innovative approaches that bridged emergency relief with long-term recovery. Her work has spanned mobilizing $1 billion in aid after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, introducing cost-saving logistics platforms in Central Africa, and pioneering economic resilience programs during the global food price crisis.
Stefanie’s leadership has included guiding USAID’s humanitarian surge teams in crisis zones
such as Libya, advancing conflict-sensitive programming in West Africa, and establishing
USAID’s first permanent humanitarian presence in Afghanistan. She has cultivated strategic
partnerships across governments, UN agencies, NGOs, and the private sector, ensuring aid
reached the most vulnerable while strengthening local capacity. Her career reflects deep expertise in navigating geopolitical complexity, sustaining humanitarian principles in volatile settings, and scaling impact through data-driven decision-making, capacity building, and collaborative governance.
Today, she draws on her extensive field experience to advise organizations on humanitarian policy and strategy, grounded in the belief that true humanitarian assistance is the exercise of soft power at its best.
