Co-founder of Mindfulness Africa and Peace & Healing Circles South Africa, South Africa.

Jenny Kanau is a Buddhist lay teacher, Group Facilitator, Leadership Mentor, Intrapreneur and co-founder of Mindfulness Africa and Peace & Healing Circles South Africa. She represents the Kagyu Samye Dzong Buddhist Centre as a trustee and outreach programs to help vulnerable women and babies in maternity hospitals. Kanau represents Tibetan Buddhism in the Cape Town Interfaith Community, and she is a member of the Advisory Council of the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative (CTII).

Jenny initially trained as a Human Rights lawyer and has dedicated the last 2 decades pioneering compassion, mindfulness, resilience, values based decision-making and peace training  in South Africa. Jenny has developed courses to promote impartiality and social justice and run trainings in "Values based inner decision making" for magistrates and prosecutors in South Africa and the interfaith community. She has received international accreditation as a facilitator/ trainer from The Mindfulness Association (UK), Mindful Schools (US), Centre for Compassion, Integrity and Secular Ethics at Life University (US), The Applied Compassion Academy at Stanford University (US) and the United Nations Peace University- UPEACE (Costa Rica), among other well-known international accredited institutions.

 She continues to work in various sectors including interfaith, education, judicial, trade unions, health care, public and the corporate sector. Her work has a special focus on youth at risk, vulnerable mothers, infants and supporting vulnerable communities. She believes deeply that communities know their own needs and have their solutions and follows the community ethos of “nothing for us, without us”.