Vincent Delgado

Vincent Delgado operates at the intersection of global migration, systemic transition, and place-based sustainability. As an senior teaching specialist, strategist, and community organizer, his work focuses on building the invisible infrastructure required to navigate complex organizational and ecological change, repairing fractured networks into ecosystems of resilience. Vincent is founding director of Michigan State University’s (MSU) Program on Sustainability in Costa Rica and co-founder of both the Refugee Development Center and MSU Network for Global Civic Engagement. A former Associate Dean for Civic Engagement and Lansing City Council member, he has spent decades cultivating diverse coalitions—spanning grassroots activists, philanthropic funders, and municipal governments—to drive large-scale social justice and systemic change.

​ Vincent collaborated with Indigenous and Puerto Rican community-based artists and scholars to design radical reciprocity (radicalreciprocity.com), a proprietary systemic change framework used to build strategic collective action, cross-border coalitions, and non-extractive networks. His capacity to guide leaders through times of acute transition was developed through experience with global humanitarian crises. As a former refugee resettlement director, he led the structural integration of Afghan families and the Lost Boys of Sudan following 9/11. During the pandemic, he developed How do we Connect? Global Engagement in Times of Crisis, a cross-continental framework that challenged students, scholars and community leaders to examine what Charles Eisenstein calls the snapped and “dangling braids” of normality, co-creating new pathways for engagement.

​Vincent’s commitment to meaning-making and storytelling stems from his early career as a print journalist covering humanitarian issues in Central America, labor in Mexico, and political governance in the United States. His research and narratives have been published in major newspapers, travel magazines, and international academic journals, and he is the author of A Taste of Freedom: A Culinary Journey with America’s Refugees (2003).

​Whether designing international partnership ecosystems or helping leadership teams stay grounded and clear-headed under pressure, Vincent’s work is guided by Adrienne Rich’s call for collectives to “age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” Vincent lives, works, and maintains deep relationships in Monteverde, Costa Rica, alongside his wife, photojournalist Becky Shink, and their two sons, Pablo (17) and Diego (13).