Jane Kennedy

Jane Kennedy was born in 1951 in New York City, New York, and raised Catholic in the very white, Judeo-Christian hamlet of Stuyvesant Town. Jane lived in New York until approximately 1970.

Jane attended college in Massachusetts and in New York until her family moved to Florida. She graduated from Tampa University in 1973 in with a degree in medical technology. She moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to pursue advanced certification in immunohematology (blood banking) at Johns Hopkins University. After her first year of college, Jane had an unplanned pregnancy, leading to a legal abortion. This experience raised her feminist consciousness.

During the 1970s and 80s in Asheville, North Carolina, Jane was involved in the rape crisis center, feminist spirituality groups, and planning for the first Southern Women’s Music & Comedy Festival (held in Georgia in 1984). During the 1990s, she was one of the first lesbians in the area to have a child by artificial insemination.

In 1977, Jane Kennedy moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to take a job as a blood bank supervisor.  In 1982, she started work with the Asheville Red Cross, where she stayed until retirement in 2011. At Asheville Red Cross, she had a variety of jobs, including laboratory work, the AIDS Education Coordinator, and Human Resources officer. When the local, Asheville Red Cross merged with the statewide Red Cross, Jane took the job of statewide education coordinator, responsible for all the people who recruited, collected, manufactured, stored, and shipped blood and blood products in North Carolina. Jane was promoted into leadership development and organization development, working with supervisory staff. She became education director for the Southeast, encompassing North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Puerto Rico, when the Red Cross reorganized as a regional office.

Jane Kennedy has been involved in Jungian dreamwork since 2018. She facilitates individual and group explorations of nighttime dreams. It is thought that through our dreams, we come back into connection with feelings, thoughts, experiences, etc., that were not completely felt or integrated at the time they occurred. We may not have had the inner resources to successfully manage them then. As we age and mature, however, perhaps our psyche gives us other opportunities to finish the emotional work of yesteryear. Our dreams can be the doorway to the past, and they can be critical components of the inner work of aging. 

Since retirement, Jane Kennedy has volunteered with the Open Umbrella collective (a group of abortion doulas) and SisterCare WNC [Western North Carolina], which focuses on aging lesbians, many of whom are without family. SisterCare WNC volunteers go into women’s homes to cook, do laundry, buy groceries, and provide other kinds of non-medical assistance. Because of their 501(c)(3) non-profit status, they can’t limit their work to women or to lesbians. However, they were organized primarily to serve the LGBTQ community.

See also:

Sasha Ray, “Finding Sheville,” Sinister Wisdom 109 (Summer 2018): 120-25.