User:JeffreyArthurVA/sandbox3

Jo Ann Jenkins is the CEO of AARP. She was appointed on September 1, 2014, having previously served as chief operating officer from 2013 to 2014. Between 1994 and 2010, she was a senior adviser, chief of staff, and chief operating officer of the Library of Congress.

Education and early career
A native of Mon Louis Island, Alabama, Jenkins graduated from Theodore High School in Theodore, Alabama, in 1976 and went on to attend Spring Hill College where she majored in Political Science. After graduating from Spring Hill College in 1980, she became a voter outreach worker on Ronald Reagan's 1980 Presidential Campaign. Following the campaign in 1981 she began working as an executive assistant at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and later moved to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), where she served as special assistant to Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole from 1985 to 1987. In this role Jenkins and Dole led an effort to bring women into leadership positions across the DOT. She spent three years in the private sector as a partner for Quality Management Services from 1987 to 1990. Jenkins then joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture as Director of the department's Office of Advocacy and Enterprise, a position she held from 1990 to 1993.

Library of Congress
Between 1994 and 2010, Jenkins was a senior adviser, chief of staff, and Chief Operating Officer of the Library of Congress. In 2001 she worked with then-first lady Laura Bush and Librarian of Congress James H. Billington to launch the National Book Festival, an annual intergenerational event that promotes reading and literacy by bringing in authors, illustrators and poets for presentations, talks and book signings. The festival grew to become a large-scale event, with more than 200,000 people attending in 2016. In 2008 she developed the Library of Congress Experience, which digitized important written works including the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution of the United States. This allowed people visiting the library to compare the rough drafts of these founding documents with their final versions, showing edits, corrections and margin notes made by key authors including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams.

AARP
Jenkins joined AARP in 2010 as president of AARP Foundation, the organization's affiliated charity. In this role, she focused the foundation on four areas of work affecting Americans age 50 and up: income insecurity, housing, isolation and hunger. She created a program with NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon called Drive to End Hunger, which drew attention to the issue of food insecurity among older Americans by donating 36 million meals and providing funding to more than 100 organizations fighting hunger in the U.S.

Following one year as Chief Operating Officer, Jenkins was appointed to her current role as CEO of AARP in 2014. According to The Washington Post, Jenkins "fundamentally recast the organization’s mission" based on the trend of longevity. AARP was originally formed to serve people approaching and in retirement but she observed that as Americans are living longer they are working longer and are eschewing previous generations' definition of what lifestyles they choose to live at and beyond age 50. She described this shift, saying "we know that people who continue to work or even volunteer can live longer than people who don't. So all those misperceptions of what people want when they retire or what they want to do in their older life I think is being totally torn apart by the idea that people are going to live longer, healthier — and hopefully in better financial shape — than they had in the past." Under Jenkins' tenure close to half of AARP's 38 million members are still working full- or part-time, representing her strategy to evolve AARP as Boomers and Generation Xers desire and need to continue working longer than their parents' generations. She oversaw the introduction of new benefits designed to help AARP members find work at employers with age-friendly employment practices and continued the organization's involvement in advancing legislation to strengthen federal age discrimination laws.

Caregiving, CARE Act

Jenkins' focus on the future of aging led her to write the book Disrupt Aging: A Bold New Path to Living Your Best Life at Every Age in 2016. She has become a speaker about the changing nature of aging at global conferences, including the Davos World Economic Forum, the Milken Institute Global Conference, the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics World Congress, and the White House United State of Women Summit.

Under her leadership AARP has pushed boundaries of what a traditional nonprofit // taken

Jenkins has involved AARP in

--investing in marketplace innovation that benefits AARP's demographic. It launched innovation fund. In 2018 it gave ___ to drug research. --Also, global.

Jenkins' leadership of AARP expanded the organization's involvement in global affairs on aging. --

Through partnerships (e.g. formation of global council on brain health), and in participation in forums, etc.

The aging of the world’s population is the transformational issue of our time. Today, Japan is the only country in the world where those aged 60 and over represent 30 percent or more of the population. By 2050, 62 countries — including China — will reach that milestone.

Global + Partnerships (Nontraditional nonprofit) Jenkins took AARP global (DDF)

Two prime examples of the power of such partnerships are our work on brain health and on caregiving.

In 2018, AARP's Brain Health Fund invested $60 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture fund devoted to discovering new methods for identification and prevention of dementia.