About the Founder — QPEF
Meet Jennifer Partin
Jennifer Partin founded the Quirky Pickle Education Foundation with one belief at its heart: every person, at every age, deserves the joy and the power of reading. She serves as QPEF’s Founder, Board President, and Executive Director. She is a Mississippi native who has called the Lowcountry home since 1990, and a lifelong reader who still gets a little giddy over a sharp pencil and a blank page.
Her story with words started early. Very early.
It Started on Grandma’s Lap
Long before Jennifer could read on her own, she was learning on her grandmother’s lap. Her father’s mother had been an English teacher, and she would page through old family photographs with her toddler granddaughter, reading aloud whatever was written on the back: names, dates, places, and little notes in looping handwriting. Other times she simply recited poetry from memory, and the rhythm of those words settled in for good.
Then came the comic books. Jennifer’s mom was an avid reader of Archie comics, and before long Jennifer and her sister were hooked too. They read them in the car, at the kitchen table, under the covers, and anywhere else they could sneak in a few more pages.
To this day, Jennifer firmly believes that comics, now known as graphic novels, are among the best doorways into reading there are. The pictures pull a young reader in, the story keeps them turning pages, and somewhere along the way they become a reader for life. It isn’t always a popular opinion, and she is happy to defend it.
By age five, Jennifer was already reading, so her school placed her directly into first grade. Her teachers suggested moving her ahead again, but her parents decided she was young enough among her classmates. In fourth grade, she became a spelling bee champion and advanced as far as the rules would allow. The only thing that stopped her was being too young to compete at the next level. She has been chasing words ever since.
The Two People Who Shaped Her
Jennifer’s mom wrote her own comeback story. She left high school early and, at just 16, after a military move had separated them, ran away from Massachusetts to Mississippi to marry Jennifer’s dad. She later earned her GED. Then, as the mother of two teenage daughters, she went back to college and earned her degree in radiologic technology, and Jennifer and her sister watched what strength looks like up close. As a rad tech, she worked with infants, and she loved that work.
Her mom worked alongside Jennifer’s dad in the family waterbed business. When times got tough, she launched her own career in real estate and went on to open other businesses of her own. Through all of it, she never missed what mattered: the school events, the everyday needs, and every moment her girls needed their mom. For a while, she was even Jennifer’s Brownie and Girl Scout troop leader.
Jennifer’s father opened Atlantis Waterbeds in Gulfport, Mississippi, when she was two, and grew it to four locations: Gulfport, North Biloxi, and Gautier, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. From him, Jennifer inherited her work ethic. He has always worked hard for his family, and he has always led with compassion, patience, and understanding, with his family and his employees alike.
After Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989, her father came to Charleston to help rebuild. He fell in love with the Lowcountry and moved the family here for good in 1990. Together, her parents raised Jennifer and her sister to be kind, open-minded, and creative, and to believe they could do anything in life with hard work. Summers with her mom’s parents added another example: watching her grandmother work hard as a nurse.
Jennifer lost her mom to breast cancer when she was 36, before her firstborn had turned two. Her mom never got to see her daughter go back to finish her own college degree at 50, or begin a master’s degree after that. But her example lives in everything Jennifer builds, especially QPEF’s commitment to adult learners. Jennifer knows from her own family that it is never too late to learn, and that a second chance at education can change a whole family’s story.
The Nerd Who Played Teacher
Growing up, Jennifer always felt like a bit of a nerd. She was a high achiever who simply loved learning, and in the back of her parents’ waterbed store, while they worked, she played teacher to her imaginary class. Today she gets to be an educator for real, teaching young learners in Charleston-area classrooms and in QPEF’s Language Lab™ workshops, and she plans to keep growing in that calling.
Being identified as a gifted student opened doors. She joined a special enrichment class with only about eight other students, who spent much of the day apart from the rest of the school doing group work, hands-on projects, and content other students never got to explore. As an adult, Jennifer believes that is exactly the kind of learning every child should experience.
Learning wasn’t always easy, though. Science and history were a real struggle, and she remembers reading and rereading the same paragraph in her history book, unable to make it stick. She now believes that may have been a learning difference that, back then, often went unnamed and unidentified in children. That experience gives her deep empathy for every learner who has to work twice as hard to understand the page in front of them.
A Life of Details, Design, and Always Learning
For 28 years, Jennifer co-owned BOA Construction Corporation with her father, serving as Secretary-Treasurer of a company known for high-end kitchen and whole-room renovations on Kiawah and Seabrook Islands. She ran the business behind the craftsmanship: bids, invoices, payroll, hiring, training, and the handbooks and safety manuals that kept everything running.
From 2015 to 2019, she served as Director of Finance and Administration at Charleston Collegiate School, where she also spent a year teaching computer programming to fifth and sixth graders. In 2019, she turned her lifelong love of design into Quirky Pickle Studio, the creative business that would soon grow into an international penpal club for kids, teens, and grown-ups.
Then, at 50, Jennifer went back to finish her college degree, just as her mom had once done. She earned her Bachelor of Professional Studies in Applied Communication from the College of Charleston, graduating summa cum laude with Phi Kappa Phi honors and membership in Alpha Sigma Lambda, the national honor society for adult learners.
Even when she isn’t officially a student, she is always studying something. She designs original patterns and illustrations in Procreate and Adobe Creative Suite, digs into the science of reading, and is forever sketching out the next workshop idea. For Jennifer, curiosity isn’t a phase of life. It is a way of life.
Why QPEF: Readers of Every Age
Jennifer founded the Quirky Pickle Education Foundation in 2026 to raise literacy rates across America. Its roots reach back to the pandemic, when her Quirky Pickle Sticker Pals club connected kids, teens, and eventually adults by mail, with letters traveling from America to Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, and Canada. She also briefly tested a classroom version with Title I schools before closures cut it short, an early idea that grew into ClassPals™.
To Jennifer, our nation’s low literacy rates are the biggest “quirky pickle” of all: a problem that won’t be solved by doing the same old things, but one that creativity and innovation can crack wide open.
The work begins with young children, because that is where strong reading habits take root and where early support changes everything.
But it doesn’t end there. Many adults never had the opportunity to learn to read well, often through no fault of their own, and they matter just as much. At QPEF, a grown-up reading a full page for the first time is every bit as important as a kindergartner sounding out her first word.
QPEF defines literacy broadly and joyfully, through play, hands-on activities, pen-to-paper writing, and real human connection. Today, that looks like:
- Quirky Pickle Language Lab™ workshops in vocabulary, spelling, and creative writing, where the only supplies required are a pencil and paper
- Workshops for older learners and adults, including cursive and penmanship, creative writing, and job-seeking skills
- ClassPals™, a handwritten penpal program for classrooms, homeschool pods, senior groups, scouts, and book clubs, with free packs for Title I schools and others in need
- Free books, writing materials, and prompts for communities everywhere, including literacy packets donated to Little Free Libraries by the hundreds
- Mini-grants and materials for teachers and community leaders with literacy projects that need support
- Snacks and nourishment during learning sessions, so hunger is never the reason someone can’t focus, engage, and enjoy learning
The Dream: A Home for Readers
Jennifer’s next big goal is a place readers can walk into: QPEF’s first literacy center, or a small independent school, right here in Charleston. It would welcome children as young as five and adults of any age. From there, the vision is to carry that model to communities across the country.
At the heart of that dream is a belief shaped by her own childhood. In Jennifer’s school, every child would be treated as gifted. Every student would receive the kind of enrichment she once found in a class of eight: small groups, real projects, and ideas that stretch the imagination. Children would be given the tools to broaden their horizons, expand the way they think, and discover how powerful innovative thinking can be when it isn’t boxed in.
To bring the deepest possible expertise to that work, Jennifer has enrolled in a Master of Education in Literacy, which she will complete by February 2028. It is the next chapter in a lifetime of learning, and every lesson will flow straight back into the programs QPEF offers.
A Note from Jennifer
That little girl on her grandma’s lap, playing teacher in the back of her parents’ store, had no idea where those words would take her. My mom didn’t get to see this chapter, but she is in every part of it. She showed me it is never too late to learn, and that is the promise QPEF makes to every child and every adult who comes to us.
I can’t do this alone, and I don’t want to. When you give, volunteer, sponsor a classroom, or simply share our story, you become part of raising a nation of readers. Every gift puts books, pencils, and paper into hands that need them, and brings us one step closer to opening the doors of our first literacy center right here in Charleston.
Pull up a chair. There’s always room for one more reader.
Jennifer Partin · Founder, Board President, and Executive Director, Quirky Pickle Education Foundation
Join the mission: Donate at QPEF.org · Reach us at literacy@quirkypickle.com
Raising readers. One letter at a time.