Håfa adai and tirow and welcome, Jesse Deleon Guerrero (he/him/his), serves an Agroforestry and Food & Nutrition Security Extension Agent at the Northern Marianas College- Cooperative Research, Extension, and Education Services (NMC-CREES). In this capacity, Jesse aims to promote environmental stewardship and increase food security through regenerative agriculture in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Additionally, he serves as a mentor for the NMC Proa Pathway Partnership program. He supports scholars in navigating the nuances of transferring to a 4-year institution and sailing towards a path to a meaningful research career in STEM.
Jesse’s passion for promoting food security in the Marianas has led him to a career in nutrition education. In 2012, he began his career as a classroom instructor at the CNMI Public School System Head Start Program. As an early childhood educator, he nurtured foundational life skills for his students and families. He later joined the NMC-CREES’s Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFENP) and the Children’s Healthy Living Program (CHL) in 2014. Jesse has been a long-term team member with CHL. He was a Child Health Assessment in the Pacific (CHAP) undergraduate summer fellow, assisted with data collection during the CHL trial, and helped facilitate the Saipan, Tinian, and Rota Group Model Building (GMB) workshops as a Wall Builder to highlight our community partner’s ideas for supporting a child’s diet. The workshops not only helped Jesse develop a broader perspective on systems thinking but also a lens to understand the interconnectedness of structures, patterns, cycles, and relationships.
CHL has provided Jesse the opportunity to collaborate directly with members of my community. At the same time, he feels privileged to exchange knowledge with other Pacific jurisdictions and being part of a broader network of organizations dedicated to cultivating change towards common goals. One of his long-term goals is to establish a food forest throughout the region. “I believe that community food forests offer an opportunity to transfer intergenerational indigenous knowledge and cultivate future food system leaders. By redesigning and re-indigenizing, the NMI’s food systems, we can promote regenerative agriculture and empower our local communities.”
Jesse is a wonderful team player and works well with community but considers himself an introvert. He enjoys is personal time to decompress from the day, re-energize, and prefers his “meat without feet” as a practicing pescatarian. Si Yu’os Ma’ase Jesse and we are glad to have you part of the CHL team!