Janna is a community-based researcher with five years of experience working across sectors in program evaluation, applied research, facilitation, and training. She is passionate about bridging capacities and working alongside community partners to conduct research and evaluation that is community-driven, participatory, and action-oriented. Janna has worked at CCBR since 2018, in a variety of areas such as mental health, poverty reduction, homelessness, EDI, disabilities, youth, and refugee resettlement. She has led research teams, acted as a project manager, and contributed as a team member.
 

Janna is a PhD student at the University of Guelph in the interdisciplinary program, Social Practice and Transformational Change. She has a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies and a BA in Sociology. The focus of Janna’s doctoral research is to explore the effectiveness of arts-based methods to decolonize Swiss-Mennonite narratives of settlement in Southern Ontario. As a white Swiss-Mennonite settler, she understands settler-colonial stories to be a powerful structure normalizing Indigenous erasure and settler superiority.

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In her free time, Janna likes to travel the world, hike, cook new recipes, workout from home, and watch independent movies/documentaries. A fun fact about Janna is that she spent a year volunteering in Papua, Indonesia at a grassroots women’s empowerment organization and can still speak some Bahasa Indonesia.