Meet Our Founder

For nearly a decade, Creative Entrepreneur, Independent Educator, Child Advocate + Founder Mrs.Jennifer Lee, a Puerto Rican 80’s baby from The Bronx, has focused her opening night energy levels, academic enthusiasm and street savvy zest for life to taking the road less traveled and homeschooling her two sons throughout The United States of America, by car, bus, plane and train.

Abandoning brick and mortar traditionalism and choosing interest led learning, independent study & experiential travel she became bi coastal in her sons early years going between NYC and LA.

All the while Jennifer embarked on a new level of her own journey of self education, unlearning and relearning, self empowerment, as well as professional development. She began to research best practices for an infants brain development with courses at UC Irvine.

She just like many members of this community are transforming what we have been lead to believe “good teachers” look like, act like and think like. Across all industry, family and education archetypes, Jennifer has been able to act as a steadfast bridge connecting a web of deserving and dedicated families across the nation.

First and foremost, our core community is comprised of loving, dedicated, open minded, hands on parents & guardians.

We welcome, encourage and include folks from all walks of life and all hoods on the map who care to show up for the children in their lives beyond the classroom. Over the years we’ve grown this platform thanks to mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, welitas and welitos as well as social justice + reform activists, award winning educators and advocates, notably distinguished business men and women, angel investors, university professors, growth mindset influencers & awakeners, musicians, writers, life coaches, chefs, consultants, doctors, farmers, inventors, healers, budding & professional creative artists and entrepreneurs, models, designers, producers of all kinds, traveling artisans, and more.

We need all hands on deck.

Collectively we are shifting the culture and creating a future we can look forward to by holding space and mention for those of us who may not have even known WE existed before.

We come together in this space to plant permanent roots and connect together this unique assemblage of proactive mindsets who understand how vital it is to change the trajectory of the narrative early on for our present and future generations.

AND here you are!

So, about Jen. Growing up with 20 other family members in a 3 bedroom Bronx apartment, Jennifer knew little about picket fences protecting domestic life and too much about drug and alcohol induced domestic violence. Just outside of her door she saw and experienced too many things she should never have simply because it was what her environment effortlessly produced. Vials of crack littered the dark hallways that doubled as a playscape while drug addicted patients roamed round the clock trying to sell anything they could get their hands on- including children.

No Exaggeration.

And she was one of the “lucky” ones if you had to compare.

Lucky because she was born into a loving family. Lucky for her, her early childhood experience in public school was a good one -but not by her standards today.

She learned to read and write English in just a few months after starting Kindergarten since Spanish was her first fluent language.

She became bilingual despite having a mostly illiterate mother.

She was a bright girl, still the odds of the environment working against her were too obvious to ignore.

At 10, her mom moved them to NJ. She excelled in school. She liked learning. But it wasn’t long before racism and classism issues began to weave themselves into her daily experiences.

Not to mention, school in the burbs were no better.

Obvious socioeconomic differences were always apparent and Jennifer became a target for bullying not only bc she was one of only 2 children (visibly) of color in the entire school, her household’s income was also nowhere near the poverty line.

It was significantly below it.

By 16, Jennifer had had enough of the bullying, othering, over policing, hyper sexualization and simple, irrelevant, white washed curriculums.

She begged her mom to move back to The Bronx so she could pursue her love for dance and stage performance.

Being first and only person in her family who has ever attended public school outside of The Bronx and the first and only person in her family to ultimately decide against traditional schooling for their children, Jennifer was always open to doing things differently.

At 17, even as she decided to drop out of one of the most notoriously violent high schools of the era to pursue dance- her GED score was one of the top to come out of NY state that term.

10 years later when she married and became a mother, applying her short stint at Community College, life experience, mother’s intuition and free NYC library Card, Jennifer broke the biggest chain that bound her mother to a life of government codependency, profound personal shame and a life sentence to poverty and financial abuse.

Illiteracy was off the table.

Despite the immediate shock to homeschool from well, everyone, and despite being a 27 year old NYC socialite, entertainer and entrepreneur - and not a “teacher” by profession- she was successful in teaching both her own children to read before age 2.

This one act of teaching her first baby how to read at just 10 months old completely changed how she thought about the value of time she was spending with her child.

Having been targeted as young as 10 years old, racially motivated bullying and classist “othering” were all but electives for the student body in Jennifer’s experience.

As one of the only melanated students in town when she left the Bronx, Jennifer knew all too well what happens socially when you read too well, as a Brown kid in a White school.

Having dealt with domestic violence at home and extreme poverty being raised on food stamps that were never enough, she attended over 5 elementary schools in the tri-state area, all which were predominantly Caucasian and Asian.

She was tokenized by some and ignored or seemingly hated by the rest.

She was verbally abused, called every racial slur in the book, physically assaulted, spat on, kicked in the genitals, had her hair pulled, life threatened, and followed home and taunted numerous times throughout her early years in these “good” suburban schools.

Nothing was ever done to protect her inside the school despite her parents requests. However they were adamant about taking her mother to court for any more than 5 unexcused absences.

Once she had her own child, the ugly truths about compulsory schooling began to emerge with research and it undoubtedly shifted her entire outlook on traditional education.

She began to examine the effects of standardized testing, zoning laws, tax laws, federal programs like Head Start, charter schools, college and of course the public school to prison pipeline.

She recalled her own experiences and realized prioritizing her son’s early childhood development at home was not only a good idea, it was the best idea. And the results were mind-blowing!

A Word From Our founder:

Its hard to believe that such a historically rich borough with a population of 1 million+ that houses such a lucrative and longstanding investment such as Yankee Stadium, over 10 colleges (yet NOT ONE Gifted & Talented Elementary school), 20 museums (but only one bookstore) and 100’s of worship houses (full to the brim every Sunday) has managed to thrive without practically any TLC from the masses of culture it creates, supports and upholds. I digress.

No I don’t.

They call The Bronx “The Forgotten Borough.”

But not anymore.

In the last few years, the dirt has been kicked up and there seems to be some leveling of the playing field in the Yankees backyard. See what had happened was some community oriented and cultured customer service powerhouses literally set up shop with intentions to “be the change they want to see” while preserving the integrity of the ones that created the culture here before them. I can not describe the excitement I feel for the future knowing so many of us are starting to answer the calling for the needs of our community and spaces that see us and our contributions, acknowledge, celebrate and add to our worth.

It's time whoever they are, to remember where so much of culture was born and put some respect on our borough!

Unfortunately though, The Bronx is not the only one once forgotten, its just one of many. Harlem, Bushwick, Brownsville, Queensbridge, Hempstead, LES, Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, New Haven, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Oxanna, Monroe, Tulsa, Tampa, Richmond, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Compton, Santa Ana, North Las Vegas are some others to name a few.

If you were born in any of these cities in the last 60 years, you know I’m not lying.

Ill be glad to pull up to a city near you to help you figure it out if youre ready to try a different way. We already know their way aint working.

The time is now. We need all hands on deck.

The Morena Mary Poppins

Founder

Parent Educator

Advocate

Consultant

Literacy Warrior

Community Voice

Cultural Chaperone

Disruptor

Change Maker

Motivator

Support System

Safe Space