Jenny’s Helpers
Created from personal experience, to support a community.
Our Mission
Jenny's Helpers is designed to connect Regional Center clients with service providers. We are driven by a desire to provide a safe, convenient place for consumers and their families to find the resources they need.
Families will no longer have to spend endless hours surfing the web looking for resources. With the help of vendors and caregivers in communities throughout the state, we're creating a simple, central place to start those conversations.
Our dream is to help create more time for people with intellectual disabilities, allowing them to connect more with their communities, living the lives they dream of for themselves.
Our Story
For over 25 years, Jenny’s Helpers founder Tina Harshman struggled to find services and support for her children, who are all on the autism spectrum. She found that the system intended to help them instead created walls and barriers to the resources her children needed to thrive. Tina, and many parents in this situation, had to rely on word of mouth at sparsely attended support group meetings… there had to be a better, more reliable way!
Jenny’s Helpers was born to simplify this process. With the introduction of Self Determination, consumers can finally direct their own individual needs. Jenny’s Helpers exists to help them locate the services they need or desire.
Jenny’s Helpers is an easy-to-use resource to make these connections, removing the barriers of the past so individuals can open doors to their own future.
Our Founder
Tina Harshman
Advocate | Facilitator | Mother
Tina is an advocate for her children. Like many parents with intellectually disabled children, she has worked hard to secure needed services that were vital to her children's success. She took everything she learned about advocacy and started helping other parents when they encountered problems. She is always happy to learn that, with her advice, their child was able to get the services they needed.
After 20 years of waiting, California’s Self Determination Program opens up more opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. Tina wanted her, now adult, daughters to be front and center for the program. The best way for us to do this was for her to become a Certified Independent Facilitator. She feels that being able to help others navigate their way through these programs helps everyone in the long run.
She’s married to a wonderfully supportive husband and has three children; Jenny, Jonathan, and Elizabeth.