Meet Jenn

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”-  Angela Davis

Jenn Roberts is an equity strategist, facilitator, and social designer working at the intersections of systems change, equity, innovation, and design. She is the Chief Equity Officer and Principal Consultant of Versed Education Group, a consultancy that helps organizations turn their good intentions into equitable, anti-racist action through interactive learning experiences and dynamic coaching.

The joy of her work is being able to impact the issues she cares about most; education, maternal health, technology, and the arts, drawing on her past experiences as an elementary teacher, and her background in systems design and adult learning. She has facilitated groups at Google and The Obama Foundation, school systems in Camden, NJ, and Washington, DC, along with non-profits and policy organizations across the United States.

In 2018, she helped organize the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most diverse hackathons in the institution’s history. The hackathon emphasized racial, economic, and gender equity and taught principles of equitable design before participants spent a weekend designing both technical and programmatic solutions to birth, feeding, and policy inequities for mothers in the United States. Building on this model, in 2019 she supported the design and implementation of the Detroit Birth & Breastfeeding Hackathon in Detroit, MI in collaboration with Black Breastfeeding Week. She is currently organizing her third hackathon, Feminist Future(s), with the team experimenting with a fully virtual approach scheduled for April 2021.

In 2020, she was selected to be a 2021 USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow. A year-long fellowship funded by the MacArthur Foundation geared toward empowering “artists, creators, storytellers, organizers, and others working at the intersections of media, technology, and culture to further hone their practice.” Through the fellowship, she designed Colored Girls Liberation Lab, an inter-generational innovation lab specifically for Black women. The Lab launched in December 2021 and aims to be a brave and protected space for Black women and femme-identifying people to design their most liberated lives, in community.