Personal Biography
Jennifer is the daughter of a temple sisterhood president and a labor lawyer from Minnesota. She went to MN Vikings football games after Sunday School in the freezing cold, does a terrific ‘Oh ya, ya betcha’ and finds herself comforted by soups and casseroles.
Her family encouraged Jennifer to be well rounded and other focused and so she went from the Midwest of the USA to study liberal arts at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where she majored in English, and also took time to study Italian her junior year in Florence, Italy. She then crossed the country to California becoming an educator during her time at Stanford University where she received a Masters in Education and started her career as a high school teacher which she did, with love, for 10 years. From there she worked at Palo Alto USD’s district office for 16 years leading professional learning experiences (coaching and workshops) and the rest is history.
Jennifer considers her monthly budget to be a glimpse into her worldview and it includes support for the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, her local PBS station, the UN Refugee Agency, the World Hunger Program and Feed America, among many others.
Jennifer considers her passport her most prized possession and uses it well. She values experiences above things and loves using the Been app on her phone. She has many more places yet to see in the world including the Grand Canyon, Sri Lanka, Budapest and Bhutan (and many more). She doesn’t understand the limitations of being only a city, mountain, or beach person, but if forced to categorize herself she does gravitate to them in that order. She loves negronis and gin martinis and is known for her Facebook posts ‘consultant walks into a bar, take 1000’ where she shares her stories of meeting interesting humans from around the globe.
Jennifer loves the theater as it allows her to be a witness to the human condition and loves many TV limited series and fiction too. She goes to museums whenever and wherever she can and gets the audio explanation of the exhibition more often than not. She strives to be a person who can look at a painting for a long time but isn’t there yet. She loves thinking she is a foodie and aspires to like oysters, snails and carpaccio. She is someone who actually appreciates all parts to a fancy hotel room and even if she doesn’t use the bathrobe to its fullest, she really loves a good bathtub.
On the scale of hoarder to Swedish Death Cleaning aficionado, Jennifer is definitely the latter. Yet more mascara, lip gloss and face creams continue to come into her home than necessary. She gets her teeth cleaned every 6 months and is up to date on her annual physicals and vaccinations. She is a ‘get a flu shot every fall’ kinda gal. She works out three times a week and does weight bearing exercises with a trainer as she is ‘of that age’ and wouldn’t do as much without him. She is always grateful to everyone who is on her ‘extreme self-care support team.’
Jennifer brings a ‘work in progress’ mindset and authentic intention into her work as she strives to make a difference in the field of Pre-K-12 education, where she has worked for the past 35 years. She is currently a communications consultant and president of Voice Lessons, LLC and she offers workshops, coaching ,and facilitation around all forms of adult to adult communication in schools from collaboration to supervision, parent interactions to coaching. She understands educators have credentials in how to teach children and often times need help in communicating with other adults. She has written five books and is always working on the next one. She works to meet others where they are and to support them in their development to be more humane human beings and role models for the children in their care.
You can read Jen’s professional biography here.
