Jennifer is a facilitator and educator committed to collective healing and liberation, currently living in Coast Miwok land known as Fairfax, California.
She is profoundly grateful to have ten years of experience learning from and with young people as a teacher in progressive alternative schools, from Oakland, to the Bahamas, to the woods in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. After receiving her Master's in Teaching from Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Jennifer taught and created original curriculum for experiential middle and high school courses such as Peace Studies and Youth Activism, designed and led student trips including backpacking along the Yuba River, and led and participated in many Restorative Justice circles, from community building to repair after harm. She has also worked as a restorative practices trainer for K-12 educators and administrators. Jennifer recently completed my Masters in Social Change through Starr King School for the Ministry and the Graduate Theological Union, a unique graduate program on sacred social transformation. Through coursework and field experience, she has training and practice in ritual design and facilitation, cultural somatics, healing justice practices, Theatre of the Oppressed, Quaker Clearness Committees, group spiritual companionship, animism, and plant medicine and magic. She has been experimenting with integrating these practices and values into my work as a racial justice organizer with SURJ Marin. In these times of collective transformation, there is perhaps nothing more important to Jennifer than cultivating communities of belonging where young people can connect to themselves, each other, the Earth, and our individual and collective purposes. She grieves the lack of intentional initiation in my own adolescence, related to disconnection from elders, ancestors, the land and spirits of place, and intersecting systems of oppression and violence—and she feels a deep calling to repair these harms for future generations. Ritual is medicine for these times, and adolescents in particular deserve ceremony, being witnessed and held in community, and resilient relationships within the more-than-human web of Life. Jennifer is honored to tend these threads as a Leader with Stepping Stones Project. |