Class of 2020

We are proud to induct Kenna Chic into the Susan Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame.

Kenna Chic currently works at a health law firm and previously worked in the U.S. Senate HELP Committee, U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee, and the National Institutes of Health. She has been a mental health and disability rights advocate at the local, state, and national level for over nine years, dedicating her work towards removing societal barriers that people with mental health struggles and various disabilities encounter. Kenna’s mission is to defend, uphold, and expand the rights of people with disabilities through policy and law.

With her passion for change-making heightened by her professional experiences, Kenna has also served on multiple advisory boards, task forces, and fellowships in various organizations, including the Mental Health Strategic Impact Initiative, Mental Health America, and the Coelho Center for Disability, Law, Policy, and Innovation. As a voting member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Behavioral Health Integration Task Force, she worked on integrating behavioral health and primary care services, promoted the importance of peer support and expansion of mental health services in underserved populations, and voted to increase COVID-19 congressional relief funding for tele-health grant programs. As the president of Project Lighthouse, Kenna executed an online peer support system to provide users direction in navigating local mental health resources and emotional support for individuals struggling with mental health. Finally, through the Jed Foundation, she worked with Facebook on technology and suicide prevention resources.

Kenna graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where she studied Foreign Service with a minor in Disability Studies. Through her honors thesis, she addressed mental health treatment in higher education as a right under current disability laws. While serving as the student body vice president and the Chair of the Mental Health Policy Coalition, she worked on multiple projects that focus on destigmatizing, educating, and eliminating barriers around mental health resources. She established Georgetown University’s first student mental health fund in order to provide culturally appropriate, affordable, and accessible mental health care to all students. She also created a coalition of students at universities across the nation to bring reform to college mental health policies through innovation and grassroots organizing. Finally, she co-founded the Georgetown Disability Alliance, which provided a community for disabled students as well as a space for mobilization to improve the lives of the disability community at Georgetown.