Liesa Jenkins - One Tennessee

Liesa Jo Jenkins, MA
Executive Director

As recently-appointed Executive Director of ONE Tennessee, Liesa Jenkins brings deep experience in leading non-profit organizations, a leadership style that emphasizes collaboration and community engagement, and a strong passion for improving the health of individuals and communities through prevention and treatment of opioid and other substance use disorders.

Prior to joining ONE Tennessee, Liesa served as Director of the Division of Health Disparities at the Tennessee Department of Health, where she was responsible for oversight of funding to address health disparities for rural, minority and underserved populations. In addition to her service on the Governor’s Rural Task Force as chair of the Health Committee, and as a member of the Tennessee Broadband Accessibility Task Force and the Rural Hospital Transformation Task Force, Liesa provided technical assistance and coordination to teams and grantees to ensure alignment of funding proposals with the strategic priorities and measurable impact from those activities.

Liesa’s career has included leadership roles as a national consultant for statewide initiatives to support health information exchange and standards for interoperability, executive director for a regional health information exchange in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, executive director for a local non-profit community development organization in Kingsport, Tennessee, program director of an after-school prevention and intervention program for at-risk youth in public housing communities, and as a teacher of foreign language at high school and university levels.

In addition to the Master of Arts in French Literature and Language from the University of Kentucky and a bachelor’s degree in French from King University in Bristol, Tennessee, Liesa studied applied linguistics at the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon France as a Rotary International Fellow. Liesa is a native of Washington County Virginia, where she is a 7^th-generation farmer on her family farm in the Appalachian region.