Kenn Harris is a 2024 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow and recipient of the 2024 APHA Martha May Eliot Award. He is principal consultant, The Emu Consultants, LLC. And Co-Founder and CEO, The League of Voices for Mothers, Babies, Fathers and Families. What drives him every day is his hope for better outcomes for all.

His immediate past job was as Vice President for Engagement and Community Partnerships at the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) in Boston, MA where he was also the Director and Principal Investigator of the Heathy Start TA & Support Center, funded by the HRSA Maternal and Child Health Bureau. His professional career in MCH and public health spans almost 35 years.

While at NICHQ, Kenn established an innovative and responsive Healthy Start TA & Support Center to serve over 100 grantees across the country. He enhanced and strengthened the work of Healthy Start communities across the country committed to the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities in birth outcomes. In addition to addressing infant and maternal mortality, Kenn partnered with the MCH community to ensure fatherhood and men’s health was included in MCH services. He continues to build on his experience with the federal Healthy Start program which began in 1991. He is co-creator of the Core Adaptive Model for Fatherhood (CAM©), an evidenced-informed model for fatherhood/male involvement programs. He is a senior consultant with the National Partnership for Community Leadership (NPCL) on the Fatherhood Learning Academy and Responsible Fatherhood Mentoring Academy. Kenn co-authored and published an article “The Health of Young African American Men” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, 2015). Kenn is also a master storyteller, integrating storytelling in his work.