Janie Hicks serves as Learning Advocate Supervisor for the Children&rsquos Defense Fund-Southern Regional Office. She joined CDF-SRO staff in 2005. She grew up in Chicago, IL and graduated from Chicago Public Schools/Olive Harvey College Practical Nursing Program. After working as a hospital staff nurse for several years, she was introduced to vocational education and became certified to teach Vocational Education in the medical field. It was then that she became aware that there were high school graduates that could not read or write. She began to focus on and advocate for those that had been failed by the education system. She organized a tutoring program for her students and began to inform communities and churches about her findings. As a young adult, during the civil rights era, she participated in marches to improve public education, housing, public accommodations, civil rights and was active in voter registration.

Since joining the CDF-SRO staff, she has been responsible for assisting families affected by Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and a member of the Katrina Citizens Leadership Corps. Her work has taken her to the Mississippi Delta where she recruited poverty stricken, unemployed men and women for Job training in general construction. She has worked on the CDF&rsquos National Healthy Child campaign and continues to work in getting eligible children signed up for Children&rsquos Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

As a staff member she provides support to her co-workers in various SRO initiatives including Cradle to Prison Pipeline, SPARK, SRBWI, and Freedom Schools. She volunteers every year for the Samuel Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry at Haley Farm. She is referred as the Social Justice person at her church.

Janie is the proud mother of one daughter, Allison, the grandmother of Corey and the great grandmother of five.