Darcy J. Totten

Darcy Totten serves as the Executive Director at the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls. She has over 20 years of experience in crisis communications, journalism, public policy, and external affairs.

In 2019, Darcy served as the Interim Director of Operations at the Commission as the organization began a period of intense growth and transition. She moved into various roles including Communications Director and then Director of External Affairs, where she helped to lead the effort to build a significant expansion focused on women's economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. After short period as the Interim Executive Director, she was hired by the Commission to continue in the role permanently.

Darcy has built nationally recognized research, partnerships, and campaigns for the Commission including authoring the award-winning original research report, the California Women’s Economic Blueprint for Pandemic Recovery and supporting the more than 50 pieces of legislation that came from its recommendations. She built the Women Are Essential campaign to draw attention to the role of women, particularly women of color, as essential workers during the pandemic and their often overlooked contributions to the California economy. 

She has collaborated on and helped to build two nation-leading grant programs run by the Commission. The first, the College Student Right to Access Act increases access to reproductive health care at UC and CSU campuses and is designed to reduce barriers for the hundreds of California public university students seeking reproductive care. The second, the Women’s Recovery Response Grant Program, infused critical resources into communities across the state to help women and girls recover from the pandemic’s economic effects. This program eventually touched the lives of more than 10 million unduplicated women (there are 19.6 million women living in the state of California today).

She is an expert in social impact strategies, advocacy, and crisis communications with experience centered in collaborative leadership, political campaigns and community building, state and federal issue advocacy, and gender-focused public policy. She is passionate about coalition building and working with intersectional and inclusive teams that prioritize historically marginalized communities.

She is also the co-founder of Activism Articulated, a crisis communications firm that operated for 10 years in Sacramento, CA which served changemaking efforts nationwide on behalf of advocacy organizations and community groups. Projects have included support for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Black Women United, Sacramento Women’s March, the Sierra Health Foundation, CASTLA, 50 Women Can Take the Lead, and the Sierra Health Foundation amongst others. 

She has served as a Board Member for the Sacramento LGBT Center (2019-2024), Leadership California (2023 -present), and the Stonewall Democrats PAC Board (2019-2024). She is an alumnus of the Nehemiah Emerging Leaders Program Senior Fellow (Class X), Leadership California (2022), and a Coro Fellow (2018). She was a Next City Vanguard Fellow (40 urban innovators under 40 in 2019) and was named one of the Sacramento Business Journal’s “Women Who Mean Business” in 2023. She is a member of the American Leadership Forum’s Class XXX.

Darcy holds a bachelor’s degree from Mills College in studio art and visual communication and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Sacramento with her wife Jasper and too many cats.