Jenny Anderson is the Director of Families Leading Change, a statewide coalition that provides opportunities for parents, students, and other family members (kinship) to have a voice in public schools. FLC supports families by offering funding to start educational programs/projects (STEM, Arts, Financial Literacy and life skills, vocational, mental health, etc.) and trains families who want to work with their principals, teachers, and school staff to make their hometown schools better.

Some of these family teams also work on creating a school system change or policy on a local, state, or federal level.

Families Leading Change’s latest policy win was WV Shared Table which mandates that every West Virginia school creates a plan to distribute unopened foods and fruits/vegetables, including dairy products from the school cafeteria that would have normally been disposed of to students in a variety of ways such as a simple “Shared Table” during lunch, used in back pack programs, or distributed to food pantries, food banks, or other local non profits that supplement food.

Jenny is a mother of four children and has been involved in her children’s public school experience in various ways over a time span of over 25 years. She has served on parent and school improvement committees, state education advisory councils (EX. state school nutrition and SAT benchmark), chaired committees for numerous community outreach projects and programs including the Artisan’s Express public art project that raised over 280,000 for the local children’s hospital in Huntington, West Virginia.

She is passionate about school wellness and pioneered and created a wellness  environment program and youth council in her daughter’s elementary school that remains active after her departure years later.