Jennifer Helfrich is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where she is the 2015-2017 Roy Family Fellow with the Belfer Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program.

Jennifer's focus is sustainable cities: how to balance environmental impact and resource use with growth and equality in urban systems. She came to HKS to learn how to leverage market based tools to make equitable green infrastructure the obvious, prosperous choice. Jennifer's projects have included: developing private sector engagement plans for impact investment in city climate and social equity goals; and policy memos on how municipalities can use the community reinvestment act and public investments in infrastructure to drive green jobs and avoid displacement. Her Policy Analysis Exercise is helping C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group incorporate "inclusive growth" into their work by identifying the ways in which urban mitigation strategies can be paired with poverty and inequality reduction.

Prior to HKS, Jennifer worked for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the San Francisco School District on energy efficiency programs, solar incentives, conservation management, and clean energy education. Before this, Jennifer was a researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin. She co-authored comparative research on US and German policies for renewable energy and environmental impact assessment and became a contributing author for the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report with the Mitigation Working Group on Transportation. Jennifer earned her B.A. in Environmental Studies with honors from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). While at UCSC Jennifer helped build the Sustainability Office and founded the UCSC Carbon Fund which has since granted some $600,000 towards more than 100 projects reducing greenhouse gases and raising awareness. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, misses California trail running, and makes a mean apple pie.