Jenna Jasso

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Jenna Jasso
Community Organizer, Land Steward, Healer, and Empowerment Coach
Corpus Christi, Texas

About Ms. Jasso

Jenna Jasso was born in San Antonio, TX while her family lived in Devine, TX. They moved to Freer, Tx when she was 2 years old, where her fascination with the natural world began with countless days exploring her grandpa’s ranch. At age 5, her parents separated, and she moved to Corpus Christi with her mother, where she grew up with a big extended family. Jenna graduated from Carroll High School in 2002 and was accepted into the Crockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. She graduated from UT with a BA in Mechanical Engineering in 2007, when Latinas were 3% of the student population in Mechanical Engineering.

As a control systems engineer, Jenna installed and serviced control systems for schools and agencies all over Texas, but wasn’t challenged or fulfilled in her role. After a mass layoff, she sought a new path. In 2009, she traveled through Australia and Europe, making friends from all around the world, gaining perspective from various lands and cultures.

Upon her return, Jenna began community organizing and studying permaculture, a regenerative systems design framework. In 2011, she launched her grassroots initiative, LoveATX, and began organizing educational events and festivals that helped build a strong community of change makers in Austin. Her events brought organizations, businesses, thought leaders, and creatives together and started a local movement. Later that year, Jenna helped initiate a global front yard garden movement, known as “Food is Free”, that inspired thousands to transform lawns into edible community gardens.

Jenna was on the ground-breaking team that proposed and initiated the first food forest on city parkland in Texas and co-founded Festival Beach Food Forest in 2012. As community coordinator of the forest, she developed the organization, educational programs, and partnerships. Today, the forest serves as a public resource that provides food, medicine, education, wellbeing, and land access.

In 2013, Jenna became a certified yoga teacher and travelled to Peru for a partner yoga training. Her experience in the Andes of Peru was transformational and inspired her to share it with others. In 2014, she hiked the Himalayas of Nepal for a land stewardship service tour through the Annapurna. That journey helped her complete her vision for her own tours. In 2015, she began leading service adventures to the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. The tours included healing circles, meditations, and visits with local communities and schools to provide school supplies, toys, clothes, and tools.

Jenna earned her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2016 and studied agroecology and sustainable food systems at Navdanya International in India in 2018. She met her partner in 2020 and their son was born in 2021. Together they started their own native landscaping business, Tierra Sagrada, where she integrates her engineering/design background with the language of the natural world to bring regenerative design into cityscapes. Jenna has a dream to support a thousand food forests across the country, to help foster community land stewardship and restore social health with local food, medicine, education, and a place to connect to the elements of life.