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 Gutierrez (she/her/ella) is an award winning first-generation Indigenous Nicaraguan Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, full spectrum doula, cultural strategist, writer, filmmaker, and public speaker.
Her work is at the intersection of reproductive justice, disability justice, and environmental justice. She is completed the 2020 UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health Communications and Advocacy fellowship and a graduate of the prestigious 2021 Rockwood Leadership Institute Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice cohort. She wrote an essay for the book Fighting Mad:Resisting the End of Roe V.Wade (2024) and was featured in LIBERATING ABORTION: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve (2024) book. Her director debut was at the San Francisco Queer Women of Color Film Festival for the short film Drumbeat of Our Hearts (2024).Cynthia‘s published work and interviews has been featured in the New York Times, The Lily News, Elle Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Group, ect.
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. Cynthia is a proud abortion storyteller with We Testify. She is on the Board of Directors for ACCESS Reproductive Justice (Board Chair), Sistersong and the Ineedana.
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 Deep East Oakland with her husband and 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
“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