Elaine Jennings

Elaine Jennings is a highly accomplished professional with years of progressively increasing leadership responsibilities in homeland security and counterterrorism. She is the Founder and CEO of The Jennings Consulting Group, a firm specializing in helping private sector organizations and governments to develop countermeasures to terrorist threats and creating solutions to improve crisis response. This includes working with high-end entertainment clients, event venues and stadiums to develop strategies to protect large events including Super Bowl 50 in the Bay Area, Major Leagues Baseball, Paramount Pictures, and AEG Corporate, the world’s largest entertainment company.

Ms. Jennings has spent nearly 20 years managing complex policy initiatives and organizing government responses to crisis events. During her government tenure, Ms. Jennings served in several executive positions including in the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, the California Department of Corrections, and in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Administration as a member of the Advance team in which she traveled with the Governor to execute state and national media events. Her accomplishments include working on high-level initiatives including helping to develop a program to educate elected officials on emergency management, with the White House to develop communication messaging in the event of a nuclear incident and was the architect for the Large Stadium Initiative for State of California to help protect event venues. She later served as a counterterrorism specialist for Lawrence Livermore National Lab working on nonproliferation issues and leading several initiatives to improve state and local capability to prevent and respond to a WMD attack.

Ms. Jennings holds an M.A. in Homeland Security and Defense from the Naval Post Graduate School and is a certified intelligence analyst. She currently teaches Crisis and Risk Communication at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Safe Communities Institute and is a regular instructor for the California Specialized Technical Institute (CSTI) under CalOES.