Commonwealth Club: Jessica Marie Alba: The Inner Work of Transforming a Region

Join us for this Transforming Our Region Member-led Forum program on personal change and place-based identity, featuring Jessica Marie Alba. Together, we will explore how to live in ways that catalyze systems change for a Bay Area where people and nature thrive. Every systems change strategy eventually runs through a person. Land use, governance, education, and collaboration all depend on people with enough capacity to hold a long horizon. Yet many of us working on the region’s future are running on empty. We are quick to name the visible constraints, the lack of funding and the lack of political will, and slower to name the other one: our own depletion. In this session, Jessica Alba argues that our disconnection from place and from ourselves is not a personal failing or an accident of modern life. It is what our systems are built to produce. We are shaped to be useful rather than fully alive, and productive rather than present. Drawing on two decades in Bay Area transportation and civic leadership, she offers a grounded account of where she believes humanity is heading, what is already underway beneath the headlines, and why the personal layer is not a soft addition to systems change but its precondition. In the interactive portion, participants will map their own place-based identity and leave with two commitments made out loud: one thing they will say yes to in the coming year, and one thing they will stop giving their energy to. Whether you lead an organization, work inside an agency, advocate in your neighborhood, or simply care where this region is going, you will leave with a clearer sense of where you stand and what you are here to do. About the Speaker Jessica Marie Alba is the founder of Warriors of Harmony, a forthcoming book and a growing movement about what it takes to live fully in a world at a threshold. After nearly 30 years in Sweden, Jessica has spent the past two decades deep in sustainable transportation, planning, and civic leadership across the Bay Area. She joined Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates in 2004 and became one of the firm’s leaders before moving to Stanford Transportation’s leadership team in 2017. From 2020 through the end of 2025, she served as a director on the San Francisco Bay Ferry Board, appointed by the speaker of the California State Assembly. She resigned from Stanford in May 2025 without a next role lined up, following an instinct she had learned to trust more than the plan. Her work now sits where civic leadership, systems thinking, and personal transformation meet.