Jennifer Chrisler is the Executive Director of Family Equality Council and one of the foremost national experts on modern families.  Family Equality Council is the only national organization working to support, represent and connect those modern families including the one million parents in the U.S. who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and their two million children.

Under Jennifer’s leadership, Family Equality Counil has grown into the leading policy advocate on federal and state issues that impact today’s modern families, including foster care and adoption, safe schools, family medical leave, parenting protections, domestic partnership and marriage. Chrisler’s extensive nonprofit management skills are derived from her years of experience as a fundraising consultant, finance director and director of corporate communications in political organizations and LGBT groups. 

Chrisler earned her Bachelor of Arts in early childhood education from Smith College.  She and her spouse, former Massachusetts State Senator Cheryl Jacques, are parents to twins, Tim and Tom and son, Matthew.

In 2006, Chrisler mobilized hundreds of 100 LGBT headed families to participate in the White House Easter Egg Roll in Washington, DC.  The groundbreaking event received unprecedented national attention from the media and the public and represented the single largest example of LGBT family visibility in American history. In 2012, Chrisler organized dozens of LGBT parents and their children to ring the closing bell on the NYSE on the same day that President Obama issued his historic statement in support of marriage equality.

Chrisler is a talented media spokesperson and appears frequently on television and in print media as an advocate for family equality and expert on parenting and family policy issues.

She has been featured on ABC’s Good Morning America, FNC’S The O’Reilly Factor, been a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR and CNN, and interviewed in print/online outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The LA Times, USA Today, Huffington Post, The Boston Globe and the Associated Press.

Chrisler received the 2011 Urban Angel Award from the New York Theological Seminary, and has been honored by the Human Rights Campaign and the Massachusetts Freedom to Marry Coalition. She was also recognized as a “Prime Mover” by the Hunt Alternatives Foundation for her work as a national social justice leader.