Jenna (she / her), MST/MEd, is an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) who works with leaders in the public and social sector to facilitate difficult conversations, solve complex problems, build better teams, and treat one another with more love and kindness.
Jenna began teaching in 2001 as a New York City Teaching Fellow and then served as a Fellow Advisor, mentoring incoming teaching fellows. Through those early professional experiences she discovered a love for adult learning and team facilitation. In 2005 Jenna joined the founding team of KIPP AMP Academy as the school’s founding writing teacher. The next year, as the staff and student body grew, she became KIPP AMP’s Dean of Teaching and Learning. She oversaw instruction and curriculum and created the school’s approach to professional development, collaboration and learning. She served as a School Director at Teach for America’s NYC Institute, and as an Education Pioneer Fellow with DREAM Charter School.
After leaving classrooms and schools and shifting into education consultancy, Jenna spent over a decade working with school districts and non-profits across the country on system-wide change initiatives, implementing broad reforms and balancing the priorities of diverse stakeholders. Jenna built, led and executed the Gates Foundation’s Florida Implementation Network over the course of a two year engagement, convening leaders from Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Lake and Volusia County School Districts to share struggles and best practices and, ultimately, to break down communication barriers. She designed a multi-day team retreat for the Annie E. Casey Foundation intended to create space to voice and manage underlying anxiety, feelings of failure and frustration, to iterate and ideate on possibilities and to build strength as a team. She has designed and facilitated board retreats, led teams through deep reflection on race, power, and identity, and has designed processes to interrogate and rebuild organizational culture to center their unique and evolving needs.
These days, much of Jenna’s work is with leadership teams in the social and public sectors who are looking to build stronger relationships with each other in order to do better work together. Jenna helps her clients gather and examine feedback on their leadership, and facilitates otherwise scary conversations infused with as much love, joy, and humanity as possible. Most recently, Jenna and Stacy have worked together with individual leaders and senior leadership teams at the NYCDOE, Planned Parenthood, Harris for President, and Empower Project to build their leadership capacity.
Jenna joined the faculty of Teleos Leadership Institute in the spring of 2022, helping to develop a program that aims to teach foundational coaching skills to leaders in the education sector. She’s honored to help facilitate the Coaching Essentials program alongside her own coaching mentors.
Jenna holds a BA from Syracuse University, an MST from Pace University and an MEd in Policy and Management from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Jenna lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and their three kids.
“There aren’t enough good words to describe how I feel about Jenna… she was there with me through some incredibly dark and challenging professional moments, and was able to see and support me through not only work decisions but personal ones… Toward the end of our time I was choosing between two job offers and she helped me make the decision in a way I still feel confident and proud of…”