Meet the Candidates

Jenny is a mom to three children who attend Chicago Public Schools. She and her family live in North Center. As a former Special Education teacher, she understands the critical role of addressing mental health as well as the importance of advocating for the most vulnerable populations. 

When her kids were young, she worked with Embarc. Embarc is a local nonprofit that awakens students to the power of their potential by taking them out of their neighborhoods and exposing them to new experiences in the city. Alongside the students, Jenny was given opportunities to step outside her bubble and she experienced mindset shifting realities which shaped her future. As a new mom, she couldn’t help but to compare her own kids' experiences to the students in Embarc. Her kids were growing up in a neighborhood surrounded with support and access to opportunity. North Center has good schools, safe housing, thriving businesses and so much more. Meanwhile, the Embarc students were living in neighborhoods that had been divested in for years, leaving them with deteriorating houses, empty lots, schools that couldn’t hire enough teachers and invested more in security then social workers, corner stores with bars on the windows, lack of access to public transit, mental health, jobs, grocery stores and so many of the other things that she knew helped her kids and others in North Center thrive. It became clear to her, the safety of a neighborhood depended on the support and access that community had. If we wanted to change outcomes we needed to invest in communities and its people.

She and her family were driven to act and got involved with several community development projects in underserved areas of the city including E.G. Woode operating in Englewood. She saw the need for action in her own neighborhood and founded the Coonley Antiracism Group at her kids’ school so that parents and caregivers could learn, grow, and act as a community to deepen their antiracist practices. Additionally, Jenny co-leads the Public Safety Justice Team at her synagogue, Mishkan where she worked to pass ECPS.