Brandi b. kenner, phd

Dr. Brandi B. Kenner is a cognitive developmental psychologist, social entrepreneur, and educator who has dedicated her 20+ year professional career to doing her part to ensure rightful opportunities and access are a norm for all children, families and communities. Known for her knack for building bridges among research, practice, and innovative technologies, her dedication to this work was recently recognized by the International Society for Self-Directed Learning, in February 2022, when she was awarded the "Malcolm Knowles Memorial Self-Directed Learning Award: for Significant Lifelong Contributions to the Field of Self-Directed Learning,” as well as her award as a 2024 Camelback Ventures Conscious Tech Fellow, and a 2024 Gates Foundation Promising Entrepreneur of Color ASU+GSV Sponsorship.

Dr. Kenner's primary areas of expertise are: organizational development (including start-up efforts, as well as overall organizational health and sustainability); early learning and development; research and data analytics; program evaluation; educational technology and product design, Deep Learning and bias mitigation in AI models, dual-language immersion, and adult learning. 

Prior to founding Village Nanny, Dr. Kenner founded several other successful start-up ventures in the education and consulting sectors, including a dual langauge immersion charter school, a language immersion preschool, and a social enterprise consulting firm, Choice-filled Lives Network (CLN). Through her work with CLN Dr. Kenner has served dozens of well known corporate, philanthropic, and nonprofit clients in areas of business strategy, product design, and research. She has also served in executive leadership roles with large nonprofits and philanthropies such as Chief of Research, Innovation & Learning for the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, as well as a Director of Research and Sr. Advisor at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Sr. Research Advisor for Age of Learning/ABCmouse.com and their Mastery Products.  

Dr. Kenner holds a Ph.D. from Emory University‘s Laney Graduate School in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, an M.Ed. in Behavior and Learning Disabilities from Georgia State University, and a bachelor’s degree with foci in Elementary Education and Sociology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  She also holds a leadership certification in Nonprofit Leadership, Governance and Finance from the Georgia Charter Schools Association, and a Google certification in Large Language Models. Brandi maintains a higher education affiliation as an Affiliated Research Scientist with Yale University's Haskins Laboratories.

As Co-founder and CEO of Village Nanny, Brandi wakes up each day obsessing over how we can build a scalable movement of purposeful, values aligned extended kinships among communities throughout the world, all while supporting families with optimal capacity and care and empowering caregivers to thrive economically and grow professionally.