About Bay Area Older Adults™

Bay Area Older Adults is a charitable 501(c)3 organization that helps older adults of all abilities improve the quality of their lives.

How The Idea Came About

Bay Area Older Adults (BAO) was founded by Anne Ferguson in 2008 out of her love for her dear grandparents, who passed away a few years earlier. At BAO, we are inspired by our desire to bring joy to and improve the lives of older adults. BAO is Anne’s humble offering to the older adult community in the name of her grandparents, Jacqueline and Jean–Paul Latil.

Mission

Our mission is to stimulate the hearts, bodies and minds of older adults through easy access to arts and culture, nature and new friends.

Vision

Our vision is to create sustainable communities of adults age 50+ who participate in healthy activities together, socialize and support each other.

Two Offerings

BAO EVENTS. BAO offers adventures organized by us for you. We trek on nature trails, learn about different cultures, explore historic sites, experience new culinary flavors and help connect you to people with shared interests. For a list of programs by category, please click here. Watch this short video to see the variety of programs we offer and the wonderful people we serve.


For testimonials, please click testimonials.

PLAN YOUR OWN. If you prefer going places on your own or with friends and family, we offer a detailed guide of regional outdoor, fitness, social and educational activities to design your own adventures. Rather than having to search through different newspapers, newsletters, magazines and a host of different internet sites, we collect all of this information for you, in one convenient location with all the details you need to venture out with confidence. Please visit this link for an example of the detailed information we offer.

Benefits of becoming a member

Basic membership is FREE. Join using this link. Basic Member Benefits include

  • Comprehensive Monthly Newsletter: highlighting social outdoors, cultural and educational activities around the Bay Area and beyond.
  • Up to 25% Discount on BAO events
  • Automatic Enrollment in our GoMo Game: for the chance to win prizes!
  • Special Offers from our Partners

Become a Premium Member for only $50. Premium membership is good for 12 months from the day membership is activated. This pays for itself after a handful of events! In addition to Basic Member Benefits, Premium Members have access to:

  • Special Free Events: These events are labeled **Premium Priority**
  • Priority Reservations for Select Events
  • Up to 50% Discount on BAO events

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Our Team

We are a passionate group of hard-working, highly efficient people.

STAFF

Nusrat Khaleeli Ph.D., J.D., Chief Operating Officer

Nusrat has 14 years of experience managing for-profit and non-profit programs and practicing intellectual property law. Dr. Khaleeli manages BAO’s Healthy Living™ Program, legal support including contracts, trademarks, patents and copyrights, and human resources. Previously, she held positions at two biotechnology companies and two law firms, Perkins Coie LLP and King and Spalding LLP. She is a member of the State Bar of California.

Nusrat recieved a Chemistry Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. She holds a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law where she served as a Technical Editor for the Computer and High Technology Law Journal and received a High tech Law Certificate. She won the Witkin Academic Excellence Award in technology licensing. For a list of her patents and publications, please click here.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Anne Ferguson Ph.D., M.B.A., Executive Director, Founder and Chairperson of the Board

Anne manages Bay Area Older Adults' daily operations, long term strategy, finances, fundraising and volunteers. In order to further advocate for Bay Area seniors, Anne was appointed as a member of the Aging Services Collaborative Leadership Council where she worked with other organizations and individuals to provide leadership and build community-wide capacity to support, maintain, and promote the well-being of older adults and their caregivers in Santa Clara County.

In the first part of her career, Anne was awarded two pre–doctoral and two post–doctoral fellowship grants for cancer research and published 15 peer–reviewed scientific articles within five years. She transitioned into the commercial sector where she has more than 13 years of strategic marketing and business development experience within global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies such as Molecular Devices, MDS Sciex, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Affymetrix and XOMA. At these companies, she was responsible for closing multi-million dollar contracts with commercial and non–profit entities, management of multi–disciplinary project teams and leading development and execution of business strategy and project plans.

Anne received her Ph.D. from UC San Diego, pursued her American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship to identify new breast tumor markers at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and completed her M.B.A. at San Jose State University. For a list of her publications, please click here.

Thu Trinh B.S., CFO and Member of the Board

Thu advises Bay Area Older Adults on operations and oversees the finances. She has been a Quality Engineer, Manager and Principle Member of the Technical Staff at Sun Microsystems and Oracle (after Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle) for the past 22 years. She has worked with many project teams to launch a variety of hardware and software products. Thu loves the outdoors and sports including snowboarding, rock climbing, ice hockey, bicycling, hiking and more!

Thu has a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Kevin Sato, Ph.D., Secretary and Member of the Board

Kevin advises Bay Area Older Adults on program management. Kevin Sato is a project management leader with more than 18 years of experience. He is currently the NASA Space Biology Senior Project Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he leads strategic and tactical planning and execution for NASA bioscience efforts to understand how life responds and adapts to microgravity and the extreme environment of space. Prior to this, he was Chief Scientist at Fully Integrated Life-cycle Mission Support Services (FILMSS) and Project Scientist at Lockheed Martin. He is an associate editor of the Nature Partner Journal Microgravity. In 2011, he was presented with the Silver Snoopy award, which is the Astronauts’ own award for outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success.

Kevin received his Ph.D. in Biology from UC Irvine and pursued his American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute. For a list of his publications, please click here.

John Przypek, Member of the Board

John is instrumental in implementing our sustainability strategy and tactical plans. He is a high technology professional with over 30 years' experience in sales and marketing management roles for various electronics component distributors including Future Electronics and Premier Farnell. At Premier Farnell (acquired by Avnet), he was responsible for the ecommerce firm’s leading semiconductor lines as the North America and Global supplier account manager for semiconductor vendors including Texas Instruments, MicroChip, Linear Technology (acquired by Analog Devices), and Nordic. As a Northern California Manufacturer's representative with Centaur North, he established vendor partnerships including TE, Semtech, Adesto and others at IoT accelerators as well as venture capitalists to achieve early design access and rapid commercialization of client hardware designs.

John specialized in technical sales involving IoT applications, embedded designs, wearable technologies, wireless, and IP. Most recently, he worked for the Fortune 100 firm, Honeywell, as Regional Distribution manager for sales in the Western states and Western Canada.

BOARD OF ADVISORS

Lori Andersen M.P.A., Tactical Advisor

Lori helps us connect to the nonprofit organizations that serve older adults in Santa Clara County and provides feedback on short- and long-term planning. Lori presently serves as Operations Director of Long Term Support Services at the Santa Clara Family Health Plan. Lori has extensive experience in the field of aging with more than 30 years working in public and non-profit organizations in the areas of planning, program development and operation, grants management and fund development. For eight years she served as Director of Planning for the Council on Aging Silicon Valley responsible for assessing the needs of older adults and building community capacity to address them. As Director of the Bay Area Independent Elders Program, Lori managed a $6 million grants program for a foundation collaborative that was designed to strengthen and expand local resources for long term care programs. Prior to joining the Santa Clara Family Health Plan, Lori was Director of the Health Trust's Healthy Aging Initiative, where she built programs for advocacy, caregiver support, expansion of health promotion programs and community engagement opportunities for older adults.

Lori holds an M.P.A. from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Government and Public Administration from American University in Washington D.C.

Michael Hundt Healthy Hikes™ Program Advisor

Mike is our indispensable expert who gives us advice on trails and interpretation and one of our hike leaders. He was born and raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm and grew up outdoors baling hay, chasing cows, fixing fences, picking rocks and working in the tobacco field. After college, he started his computer career at Amdahl, and for 25 years, he installed and maintained large mainframe computers used by multibillion dollar companies, the military and many others. Later, he taught people how to install and repair these huge mainframe computers. After retirement, he was able to focus on his love for nature and has been investigating, photographing and videotaping wildlife, especially tule elk, bobcats and mountain lions. He is a certified California Naturalist, Field Technician for the Coyote Valley bobcat and Henry Coe mountain lion research teams, and a volunteer docent and interpreter for Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority and Henry Coe State Park.

Bronwyn Barnett M.A., Marketing Communications Advisor

Bronwyn is BAO's marketing communications advisor. She has held many high level marketing positions including Head of Marketing Communications at Invitae, Deputy Director of Communications at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, marketing communications manager at Affymetrix. Previously, she was Managing Editor at Red Herring magazine, a weekly print publication.

Bronwyn holds a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Heidi McFarland, B.S., Park Programs and Partnerships Advisor

Heidi McFarland is BAO's Park Programs and Partnerships Advisor. Heidi has a 20+ year career in Parks and Natural Resources as a seasoned park professional, environmental educator and interpreter, and has extensive experience in volunteer management. She advises BAO on volunteers, park trails, interpretation and partnerships. Heidi is currently a professor at West Valley College in the Park Management Program where she teaches and develops partnerships with community-based organizations. She spent more than 16 years with Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation ultimately leading to her position as Park Interpretive Program Coordinator. During this time, she grew the county parks volunteer program and created the docent program to deliver high quality interpretive programs.

Heidi holds B.S. in Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Environmental Education from San Jose State University, and Associate’s degrees in Park Management and Communications from West Valley College. She is also a Certified Interpretive Trainer, California Naturalist Instructor, Project WET and Project Learning Tree Instructor and more!

Lynnette Vega M.A., Program Advisor

Lynnette provides creative and logistical advice on BAO programs. She has nearly 30 years experience developing and directing innovative social, cultural, educational and health-related programs for older adults and adults with disabilities in the Bay Area. She has worked at LGS Recreation, Lytton Gardens Health Care Center and Fair Oaks Senior Center. Additionally, Lynnette is a Community Education instructor for Foothill College's Adaptive Learning Division.

Lynnette has a Masters Art Therapy from Notre Dame de Namur University.

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Donors and Sponsors

Bay Area Older Adults™ is a tax-exempt charitable organization, qualified under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. All contributions and sponsorships are tax-deductible. For more information about individual and corporate donations and sponsorships, please visit the donation and sponsorship page.

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Our Partners

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Governance & Finances

For our governance documents, important policies and latest Form 990 filed with the IRS, please click on the links below.

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