Jessica Travenia joined the Ed Fund as the Program Director of the Richmond Rapid Response Fund. She is a Bay Area Native and a resident of Richmond who has dedicated her career to supporting justice by eliminating barriers. She brings her experience as a first-generation college student, organizer, survivor and advocate of peer support and amplifying the voices of those with lived experience in policy development. Jessica seeks to bring the voices of the most impacted to the table and ensure they remain at the forefront of the solution. To Jessica, the heart of system change is always the people who are most impacted and vulnerable and policy change is about moving resources. She is also a mother, a doula, an herbalist, educator, entrepreneur, culture worker and poet who sees integrating culture, holding sacred space, healing and personal development as central to grounding professional work in integrity and shared values. She loves art, reading and listening to podcasts, hiking and connecting with nature. In order to meet the demands of the ongoing work, global, fiscal and political landscape, she believes in community care and ongoing healing which honors Black, Indigenous, and Brown people and our ancestral and cultural modalities at the heart of her praxis and personal grounding.
