Jen Curley: bringing the best

Jen Curley was raised in a labor-oriented family. Her father was an iron worker his whole life, putting in 20 years as president of the Iron Workers’ Union.

“My parents modeled hard work and support for others, struggling to make a good life for their families,” Jen said. “We were definitely the working class who didn’t have time or money for higher education but improved their families’ through long hours of hard work, day after day.”

Growing up in Binghamton, Jen remembers visiting Ithaca as a young child.

“It was so beautiful and upscale,” she said. “It was a place I aspired to live in someday.”

After high school, Jen attended Broome Community College and then graduated from Cortland State.

“I had to work twice as hard as my friends in college, who grew up much differently than me,” Jen said. “When I graduated in 1991, I told myself again, ‘I’d love to live in Ithaca someday.’”

Jen analyzed her strengths and her weaknesses.

“I’m not built for an office job,” she said. “I can never just sit and work quietly.”

So, Jen headed to New York City and taught health education “and anything they asked me to teach at Washington Irving High School.”

She commuted daily by subway, between Union Square and the Bronx. After four years of inner-city public schools in the country’s largest public school system, taking in all the economic stratification of rich and poor, white and people of color in NYC, she headed to the Southwest, where Jen taught in two public high schools in Arizona.

Jen moved back to New York state in 2005 and took a teaching job in Elmira, observing the same poverty she observed, taught and lived amongst in NYC, only the form of central New York poverty was different. Families were still struggling, industries were going belly up, and only the prison industry was a stable employer, supported by taxpayers.

Back in 2009, Jen met her husband, Jed, while volunteering for CRT, Composting Recycling and Trash. CRT is familiar to folks who attend Grassroots Festival, Ithaca Festival, the Wine Festival, Brewfests and other community gatherings where large groups of us create food waste, recycling and trash.

Jed struck up a conversation about composting while Jen was working at the Stewart Park Ithaca Brewfest CRT station, and two years later, they were married in the same picturesque spot on Cayuga Lake.

In 2010, Jen and Jed bought their home in the southside of Ithaca and rehabilitated it from the ground up. Jed, a gifted finish carpenter, can do anything, according to his impartial spouse.

Many of their amazing rooms have incorporated salvaged treasures like cherry wood flooring cut from construction along Route 17 in Owego, exotic woods Jed collected over the years, right down to their sustainable locust wood fence given to them by Jed’s brother and sister-in-law for a wedding gift.

For a while, Jen sampled teaching within a private state nonsecure facility and then in a middle school in Syracuse. Seeing the challenges of at-risk kids in both settings, many involved with the juvenile justice system, and the limited resources available for the students and their families with such unremitting challenges of poverty, homelessness, the ravages of unmet drugs, alcohol and mental health needs informed her daily grind.

When Jen became employed by the Ithaca City School District, she noted the contrast.

“After Syracuse, it was like the ‘Tale of Two Cities,’” she said. “Ithaca has so much wealth and so many resources. Syracuse has so much poverty and inequity.”

Finally, in 2019, Jen found the job she had dreamt about for years — teaching at Lehman Alternative Community School. She co-teaches with amazing people and has her own classes. She loves her job, colleagues and the students at LACS.

“I have never worked with students who are so grateful, thoughtful and kind,” she said.

Despite the challenges, Jen has stayed true to her mission: helping working-class people, no matter what their challenges, have a chance at a good life, through her extensive volunteer work and her teaching. She never fails to mention how supportive her husband Jed is and how she feels safe to continually extend herself with him in her corner.

Jen has never set her sights on becoming wealthy; she has all that she needs, she said, so she has shared her time and energy volunteering with groups that promote environmental protection, animal rescue, food security, voting rights and safe housing for all.

These days, when Jen and Jed are not busy working on an off-grid cabin in Danby, Jen volunteers with the Friendship Donations Network to ease food insecurity and prevent waste.

Stay tuned for more on that marvelous program soon. For now, when you read Jen’s weekly free offerings of food from the FDN, you’ll know Jen Curley always loved Ithaca, and now that she is a local, she is bringing the best to us.