Susan Armstrong is a Director on the Board of Conejo Valley Village. Aware of the Village to Village concept for many years, she was excited to become a member and volunteer of the Conejo Valley Village in 2017. A native Californian, she grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned a BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Susan brings 25 years of experience in Clinical Research conducted in patients with Oncology, Hematology, and Infectious Diseases. In both the hospital and corporate settings, she was involved in the collaboration, development, and coordination of Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical trials for new therapies. Her experience in regulatory agency submissions allowed her to extend her career as a Clinical Research Consultant helping to guide researchers and start up companies in their product development process. In retirement Susan volunteered as a tutor for the Conejo Valley Adult school and was on the Disaster Services Team for the American Red Cross. Her leisure time is spent traveling, gardening, and enjoying nature.
Barbara Balke - Board Director
Barbara Balke is a Director on the Board of Conejo Valley Village. Barbara Balke brings to Conejo Valley Village a lifetime of volunteer service in many capacities. Barbara served as the Volunteer Coordinator at the Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) in Los Angeles County for 25 years ensuring the delivery of quality volunteer service. As a devoted wife of 58 years, and dedicated mother of 5 and grandmother of 7, Barbara has volunteered for the PTA, the American Cancer Society and Cub Scouts, and in nursing homes. She served on both the San Fernando Valley and California State Boards of the American Cancer Society. After she retired, Barbara volunteered with Livingston Memorial VNA and she continues to do hospice work today for Kaiser Permanente visiting families in the Conejo Valley. Barbara was an active member of Conejo Valley Village’s Advisory Council prior to our launch. She developed and also serves in our Volunteer Coordinator role in which she ensures that new volunteers complete the vetting and orientation processes and can apply their talents within the Village. As a CVV member and volunteer, Barbara enjoys building relationships with others within the Village and encouraging people to find ways they can help others through volunteering. Her interests include hiking, birding, doing jigsaw and crossword puzzles, coloring, and keeping up with politics and current events.
Lori Bliss is a Director on the Board of Conejo Valley Village. She is delighted to be a part of the Conejo Valley Village. She earned a BS in Business Administration and Marketing and subsequently obtained a post graduate certificate in Gerontology. After pursuing a successful career in the Telecommunications industry and raising two sons, she turned her attention to her passion of working with older adults and their families.
Lori held a number of positions at Senior Concerns for almost 10 years where she advocated for seniors and their families and helped them find resources to preserve their dignity and independence. While at Senior Concerns, she became a Certified Senior Advisor and obtained a broad range of expertise in senior assistance programs and case management. Some of the programs that she was involved in included, Financial Abuse Specialist Team of Ventura County, Ventura County Area Agency on Aging Senior Network, Senior Advocate/Care Coordinator at the Simi Valley Senior Center, and director of the Caregiver Resource Center program for eastern Ventura County. In addition to her experience with Senior Concerns, Lori also worked at Buena Vista Hospice supporting the multidisciplinary team of healthcare experts.
When she is not volunteering for various organizations like, Ventura County Area Agency on Aging, Food Forward and Mary Hall Tree, she enjoys spending time with her family, hiking, cooking, and traveling.
Chris Jones is a Director on the Board of Conejo Valley Village. He and his wife Angela serve as Village Call Managers where they answer phone calls and emails from our members, and then log requests to help coordinate rides, home services/assistance, social events, and recreation for our members. Chris is also Board Chair for the Chordoma Foundation’s Community Advisory Board. Chordoma is a-one-in-a-million bone cancer. As a peer guide, Chris helps direct newly diagnosed patients and their family members to current information about the extremely rare disease so they can make informed decisions. He is a retired senior technical manager who until 2018, had been in the computer systems field since 1987 in various roles such as Project Manager at HP and Amgen, Field Engineer and Service Delivery Manager at IBM, and Senior Vice President of Technical Service and Operations at Countrywide and Bank of America. In his spare time Chris enjoys writing, and he and Angela enjoy traveling, gardening, and home improvement projects.
Danny White is a Director on the Board of Conejo Valley Village. He also serves as the manager of the Conejo Valley Village statistics project, which collects various kinds of data about the organization’s operations each month and then uses them to generate tables and charts that inform the Board about operational performance issues. Danny was a mathematics professor at Virginia Wesleyan College for ten years, where he taught both theoretical and applied classes including statistics and linear programming. Then Danny worked as a government contractor for 32 years where he specialized in operations research and system performance modeling, retiring in 2012 after 28 years as a scientist and program manager at Areté Associates. Danny has three degrees in mathematics: a BS from Randolph Macon College, a MS from the University of Virginia, and a PhD from the University of Montana. For the past 30 years he has been a soccer referee for AYSO Region 9 in Thousand Oaks and has earned his National Referee badge. His interests also include gardening, needlepoint, cooking, traveling, and spending time with family.