JenOsha (Señora Jen, Loba madre) is the Director of the Mountain SOL School, lead instructor for the Responder path, and co instructor for the Scout and Herbalist Programs. First and foremost, she is a passionate advocate for environmental and social justice education for our youth. She is a National Geographic Educator, the recipient of the Ambassadors for Progress award, West Virginia Wonder Woman award, the Guiding Light Award from the West Virginia Watershed Network, and is a Switzer Fellow with the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation. In addition to her roles at Mountain SOL, JenOsha is a teacher at our “Mother School” Morgantown Learning Academy where she currently teaches West Virginia History and Geography and has also taught Spanish, music, and special topics courses. She has held her Wilderness First Responder certification for over 30 years and is now a Wilderness First Aid instructor and EMT.
JenOsha received her B.A. in English with Honors from the University of Virginia and then traveled to Ecuador as a volunteer English teacher for WorldTeach. She helped to found a non profit, Fundacion Nucanchi Yuracuna, with Santiago Diaz and Rodrigo Donoso, in response to severe impacts from the El Niño storm. Her experience through the environmental disasters as well as two civil wars fundamentally impacted her views on social and environmental justice. Fundacion Nucanchi Yuracuna evolved into Aurora Lights when she moved back to the United States. She served as its President from 1998 to 2012. Deeply impacted by her experiences with landslides, she received her Masters in Forestry from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies with research on the role of native trees in reforestation in the Andes. Despite years of research, it was a young man hunting for rabbits in the Andean paramo who taught her the importance to listening to local communities and integrating social needs into research from the start. While at Yale, JenOsha was invited by environmental activist and hero Larry Gibson to come and learn about the impacts of Mountaintop removal. Initially intrigued to see how land post strip mining could be reforested, as well as a desire to learn more about her own coal mining heritage, JenOsha moved to West Virginia and fell deeply in love with the state. Remembering her lesson from the young rabbit hunter, she started the “Scholar Activist Alliance” to connect research directly with community needs in West Virginia. She integrated together research, music, and storytelling to produce the benefit CD “Moving Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining” from 2000-2003. She became a mother in 2003 and lived as a homesteader for a few years in the mountains she loves. She continued to research and organize around mountaintop removal and moved to Morgantown to complete her PhD at the geography department at WVU. For two years she lived back and forth between Morgantown and Rock Creek, WV, where her research was focused on the impacts of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining on the communities surrounding Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Jen was a co-producer for the second MTR benefit CD, “Still Moving Mountains: The Journey Home” which was released in June of 2009, and the project director for the award winning multimedia website Journey Up Coal River. The website and CD took her findings from her dissertation and, with a tremendous amount of community and volunteer support, shared important safety and organizing information as well as lesson plans and educational information to support and grow the movement against mountaintop removal coal mining. During this time, she was able to bring two groups of college students to the Ecuadorian highlands and amazon. She was married to her best friend Nick in 2010 and blessed again as a mother in 2011.
In addition to her life experiences as an activist, homesteader, and mother, the biggest inspiration to create a school such as Mountain SOL came from her time in Ecuador learning how the Huaorani people raise their children as well as a promise to share their stories. That dream manifested into reality with the energy and vision of a pack of amazing young people, co-founders Hannah Spencer and Liz Wiles, the unwavering support of Eve Ward at the Morgantown Learning Academy, and the co creation of a summer program with Bethany Boback. Coming to work every day at Mountain SOL and watching it grow with so much energy and life is truly a blessing.
JenOsha is also a musician. Her greatest joy is creating music and community with others. She and has played in both professional and for fun groups ranging from a Spanish pop music band to Celtic music to Old Time to Country and Blues. She will sing Janis Joplin or in the Yale Camerata depending on the mood. She sings, plays the piano, Irish whistle, mandolin, and banjo. In addition to MLA and Mt SOL, Jen has also taught at the West Virginia Scholars Academy at the Mountain Institute, Yale University, the New Jersey School of Conservation, Salem International University, in the geography department at West Virginia University, and at Escuela Superior Politécnica de Chimborazo. JenOsha lives outside Morgantown in the mountains with her husband, two sons, and many four legged animals.