As a small organization and startup specialist, she helps companies’ budget, spot inefficiencies and finds opportunities for operations to be streamlined and improved for organizations at the headquarters of such leading companies as Franklin Templeton Investments, Whole Foods, Office Depot, Ashoka, and MITRE.​ ​​Prior to founding Netwalking®, Jessica co-founded Beyond2ndNature in Austin, Texas organizing an America Walks Walkability Workshop led to the creation of the first standing Pedestrian Advisory Council in Austin, the coalition WalkAustin, and co-organized Austin’s first World Car Free Day in 2012. ​ Jessica has presented at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, SXSW V2V, GoodxGlobal, The Swedish Institute, Latina Entrepreneur Academy, The Walking Summit and other events focused on social impact, green solutions, and women empowerment.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/netwalking/

Jenny Hegland is a facilitator, experiential educator, and social entrepreneur whose life’s work is centered around meaningful community engagement and aims to contribute to equitable opportunities for all people to live free and fulfilling lives. Jenny moved to the Washington D.C. area in 2018 and currently runs a small consulting practice working with organizations and initiatives to build community and foster leadership development and practices that scale up from the personal to the systemic, bridging personal development with interpersonal, community, and whole systems change work. She draws from a variety of disciplines and fields in her work, including participatory and strengths-based leadership, systems thinking, visual thinking, and deep listening. She is an Art of Hosting practitioner, and co-founder of Cascading Conversations, which is a D.C.-based project to elevate community conversations that invite people into deeper human connection. She is also a listener poet with the local nonprofit Poets in Residence.

Prior to this, Jenny served as co-founder and executive director of two disaster response and recovery nonprofit organizations following a catastrophic typhoon that impacted the island of Saipan in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), where she lived from 2015-2018. Jenny spent the first ten years of her career prior to this working at the intersection of community engagement, student development, and social justice in higher education at the University of Minnesota Rochester and Winona State University.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyhegland/