Jenna

Jenna is a founding member of AORTA, an organizer, sometimes visual artist, and a parent to an amazing small kid. Passionate about transformative justice, community solutions to preventing violence, just climate transition, and solidarity economics, Jenna finds home in collective and visionary spaces braided together by queer and trans people, anti-zionist Jews, and beloveds surrounding her in her home of Philadelphia.

Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan in an upper-middle class home, Jenna learned some of her most important political lessons from her parents. Politicized around the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2001, she cut her teeth as a young organizer as part of the new Students for a Democratic Society in 2006 where she first began building skills in collective decision-making and local and national campaign organizing.

Jenna spent 8 years as a core member of Philly Stands Up, a transformative justice collective, and she continues to participate in local and national conversations and efforts towards decarceration and community solutions to intervening in violence. She has been involved for many years in the Allied Media Conference, where she has led workshops, coordinated tracks and organized content around transformative justice, visionary sci-fi, and cooperative and collective governance practice. From 2010-2018, Jenna was honored to be a member of the small and witchy Philly-based political study group, Marginal Notes.

As an artist, Jenna creates images that support the movements and political struggles she believes in. Her drawings have been widely reproduced in posters, calendars, and magazines.

As a facilitator, Jenna loves to use art and storytelling as tools for staying grounded in political history and collective vision, in order to support groups generating new ways forward. Jenna enjoys one-on -one coaching, working with other white people to become more ready for racial justice, teaching the art of facilitation, and supporting groups in visionary and strategic change work. 

When not facilitating or doing other AORTA work, Jenna can be found drawing comic books, exploring the world with her tiny family and big group of friends, reading, loving the woods, and having many opinions about the bulk sections of various food co-ops. Her work with AORTA, and our client and partner organizations fighting for social justice, is an honor, a passion, and a joy.