Having grown up in Amherst County, Hollie Jennings hasn’t traveled far from her childhood home to find her new job with the City of Lynchburg.
“You can see where I grew up if you look out the window here,” Jennings said from the third floor of Lynchburg’s City Hall.
“When I was a kid,” Jennings said, “the downtown area was not as revitalized as it is now and it was mostly commercial businesses downtown. On the weekends, there would be no traffic downtown, so we would ride our bikes from across the river, over the bridge, into downtown to ride through the parking decks.
“Can’t do that now,” she added.
In April, Jennings left a position with the Virginia Department of Education, where she had worked for 15 years, to join the city as its first ever diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) specialist.
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Jennings is a Virginian through and through. She received a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech in family and child development; two master’s degrees from Lynchburg College, now the University of Lynchburg, one in counseling and another in educational leadership; and a doctorate from UL in leadership.
But it’s not just her educational background that prepared Jennings for her new position — it’s a lifetime of service, something that was instilled in her from a young age by her family and the community she lived in.
After graduating from Virginia Tech, Jennings said she came back to Lynchburg to work for CASA of Central Virginia, an organization that advocates for abused and neglected children in the court system.
“I’ve always kind of had that calling for advocating for human rights in general,” Jennings said.
Before working in education, she held positions as a juvenile probation officer, working for the Lynchburg detention home, running its post-dispositional program, which is when she realized there “needed to be more preventive types of approaches to help kids before they got to that point,” which drove her to get her master’s in counseling and work in schools.
Most of her career in education was spent with Amherst County Public Schools from 2013 to 2021, where she was the supervisor of discipline and compliance for the division, as well as the division’s equity coordinator, allowing her the first opportunity to work in her present field.
Jennings said when she worked with ACPS, her first encounter with diversity, equity and inclusion came following a civil rights complaint from a parent that a discipline incident wasn’t handled properly. Jennings said the investigation revealed “some disproportionality that was happening in discipline in Amherst County Public Schools during that time period,” and following that investigation, Jennings took over the division’s DEI matters.
In April 2021, Lynchburg City Council voted 4-2 to approve a DEI specialist position in the city, but due to a number of factors, namely the pandemic, Jennings said the position wasn’t filled until April 2022 when she accepted the job.
John Hughes IV, assistant city manager with the City of Lynchburg, called Jennings a “welcome addition” to the city’s team.
“She has been hard at work collecting and assessing organizational data, assisting in development of the local Equal Employment Opportunity Plan for 2022-2025, and managing employee training in collaboration with the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities,” Hughes said in an email.
“Dr. Jennings’ experience as an educator, counselor, and compliance supervisor will serve her well in the City’s effort to provide a long-range DEI strategy.”
A little over five months in her position now, Jennings said she still is assessing where the city is on processes such as hiring, promotion and retention when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion through conversations and surveys with employees.
With this information, she is hoping to develop a citywide DEI plan for all practices when it comes to the workforce.
Additionally, she said she is moving along with training for any supervisor-level employee through the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, which will go all the way up to the City Manager’s Office.
“It’s not really so much about having people become interested in DEI,” Jennings said, “because I feel like a majority of people who work with the city have a heart for making sure that we’re diverse, and people are being treated fairly and that we’re taking care of each other.”
Jennings said she is looking at several ways to bring a more diverse and inclusive workforce to the City of Lynchburg. One specific way would be through collaboration with the many higher education institutions in the city to create internship and job opportunities for current students and recent graduates.
Jennings’ desire to ensure equal opportunities for all goes back to her younger days, she said, when she was taught by her family the value of service.
“My father was a volunteer firefighter for 15 years. My mother worked at what was the Central Virginia Training Center. I lived in a neighborhood where my parents felt like you helped everybody, and it didn’t matter your race or gender or religion, you helped each other because it was the right thing to do,” Jennings said.
She mentioned her father’s garden, which she said he does “not only because he likes gardening, but he also likes going to his neighbor’s house and taking them a bag of tomatoes.”
“It’s just always been, ‘You help each other,’ and it didn’t matter who you were. I knew my whole life I had that instilled in me,” Jennings said.
As she begins to use that service to ensure City of Lynchburg employees have a “welcoming” work environment, where everybody feels included, Jennings related her job to that of a business.
She mentioned Simon Sinek, a British-American author and inspirational speaker, who said, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
Jennings went on to say, “We’re not a company, but we are an organization, and I feel like the people in the city of Lynchburg will be happier and healthier people living here if the people that work here love working here.
“That’s kind of the lens in which I’m looking at what I’m doing,” she said.