Jennifer Barnhill is a journalist, researcher, and fierce advocate for military families. She is a columnist for Military.com and the host of Military Dinner Table Conversations, a reverse town hall exploring the conversations military families are having around their dinner tables—conversations that directly impact recruitment and retention. She is the 2025 Armed Forces Insurance Navy Spouse of the Year. She is a 2023 Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program Scholar and served on the board of the League of Wives Memorial Project, which helped erect the first statue honoring the advocacy of military spouses. Her work has been featured by CNN, The War Horse, Military Times and The Independent and her research has been cited by the White House.

Jennifer walked away from a PhD scholarship after falling in love with a service member, not realizing she wasn't just marrying a man—she was marrying the military. She unexpectedly fell in love with the military community too, but was soon shocked to discover that while military families took care of each other, the institution did not. It often made life harder. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Jennifer pursued a Master of Public Administration from UNC Chapel Hill while volunteering within the community to better understand the broken systems she was writing about. The experience gave her a front-row seat to how policies are made—and how they fall short.

Armed with this deeper understanding, she returned to journalism to spotlight some of the overlooked issues impacting the community: families facing food insecurity, surviving spouses fighting for earned death benefits and would-be recruits turned away due to outdated medical policies.

These and countless other experiences culminated in her debut book, The Military Stories You've Been Told: And the Ones You Need to Hear—an urgent examination of who gets to tell the military's story, and why that must change. Through it, Jennifer invites readers to reconsider what they think they know about military service—by listening to the hidden all-volunteer force, military families.

Links

Substack: https://weservetoo.substack.com/ 
IG: https://www.instagram.com/weservetoo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/More_Than_Mommy 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifermbarnhill/