Jennifer Kennedy

Jennifer Kennedy - Head of Public Affairs 

As part of the HFS senior management team, Jennifer is responsible for her team's output across member / external comms and event delivery to engage a wide range of audiences (including politicians) in support of all aspects of corporate strategy.  Ensuring that stakeholders are well-informed, this includes:

• offering strategic communications advice to the Board and Executive team
• raising awareness of the industry’s position on a range of matters and the challenges impacting its ability to deliver much needed new homes
• promoting the benefits of new homes
• stimulating debate through an ongoing agenda of informing and influencing
• supporting and growing membership

Leading the implementation of our new communications plan, over the last year Jennifer has overseen our refreshed brand identity and the expansion of our digital communications to increase the reach and amplification of HFS messaging .

Jennifer is an Honours graduate in Business Studies and a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. She also represents HFS on the Scottish Housing Day working group.  

j.kennedy@homesforscotland.com

Jennifer's housing journey:

I first left home when I was 18 and started working, renting a flat in Edinburgh with friends for a couple of years.  Then I decided to go to University and moved back home again until I was 24 and went to live abroad for ten years.  Returning back to Edinburgh in 2002, my husband and I were lucky enough to buy a lovely flat in the New Town which was just a 5 minute walk from the Homes for Scotland office at that time! 

After having two children, we wanted a house with a garden (and no neighbours above us!) but finding an affordable family home in the city centre was impossible.  In fact, finding a nice family home anywhere in Edinburgh was pretty difficult with so many people looking to do the same thing.  We would be on the web multiple times a day looking to see if anything new came on to the market. One morning, a nice-looking three bed semi in Corstorphine appeared.  We made an appointment to view it that lunchtime.  It turned out we were the first to see it but there was already a very long list of others lined up so we went back to work and immediately put in an offer.  Within an hour or so, it was ours! 

We’ve been there over twelve years now.  Whilst we did think of moving for secondary catchment areas, we would have needed to move back into a flat in order to afford the areas we liked. Having gotten used to a house and garden, that would have been pretty difficult so we stayed put, got a dog and now just dream about extending instead.