We were lucky to catch up with Jenn Warren recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jenn, appreciate you joining us today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?

In April 2021, we moved to a new home away from our family and current job as pastors. It wasn’t our plan to move while the pandemic was still on and most of Oregon was still closed, but the toxic environment at our current church, coupled with family conflict, made it necessary.

We only moved an hour away, because at the time we still planned to continue our ministry at the church while creating some distance. By May 2021, it became clear that was costing our mental health too much, and we resigned at the beginning of June.

This was only 6 weeks after purchasing our new home! We found ourselves in a new city with no established social or community network, no jobs, and no family support. 

The devastation of losing our job, family, many friends, and our church was overwhelming. But with 6 kids and a brand new mortgage, there wasn’t really time to stop and grieve. For about 3 weeks, we considered our options.

I had been running a WordPress website for our homeschool co-op for the last 2 years, so I learned the back end of how to do basic edits on a website. I had also been running social media pages and groups for our homeschool co-op and our church’s summer camp.

My husband Brian had spent the last 3 years building a blog and creative team for our previous church, doing much of the writing, planning and recruiting himself. When he offered his resignation, the other members of the blog team forced him out unless he was willing to recant his resignation from his pastoral position.

We had no formal credentials as pastors, since our previous church didn’t require a ministry degree (nor even desired it). Finding a new job as pastors was out of the question for the time being, so we turned our attention to our other skillsets.

I have been taking photos since early childhood. I experience life though my camera lens, and I’ve added to my technical knowledge whenever I had the opportunity in my spare time. I’ve also developed my writing skills through my academic career, as well as taking writing courses.

Teaching scrapbooking to others as part of a Creative Memories business taught me many things about graphic design, working with clients and creative projects.

In our job as pastors, we traveled up and down the West Coast of the United States from Alaska down to San Diego several times each year. Our kids were expert road trippers and travelers, and we also loved exploring new places wherever we could find them along our ministry trips.

We realized that we could start a family travel blog, sharing our experiences of travel as a large family. However as we started to do some market research, we realized that there were plenty of family travel blogs out there already, so the question was, “How can we stand out?”

We had spent the last 3 years getting ADHD diagnoses for my husband and 3 of our kids. It took a lot of time and energy to learn new ways of thinking and to change our lifestyle in a way that made sense for our neurodivergent family.

It dawned on me that this was a way to distinguish ourselves from other traveling families. Our family’s unique experience of traveling and living with ADHD (and later autism, complex-PTSD, and other mental health challenges) was something that wasn’t being talked about enough.

Thus our neurodivergent family travel and lifestyle concept was born! We spent some time debating our name, looking for something unique, memorable, succinct, and not already taken by someone else.

Dinkum is an Australian word that means “real, genuine”. We wanted to build a brand on authenticity and real life experiences. We chose the word “Tribe” because creating a community for families like ours is our goal.

Our Dinkum Tribe blog launched in September 2021, and we’ve been creating content ever since.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Jenn Warren, Co-Founder and Content Creator for Dinkum Tribe. I’m a Third Culture Kid (TCK) from Jamaica and California, married to my college sweetheart. I’ve been a missionary kid, pastor’s kid and (former) pastor’s wife.

My husband and I traveled as pastors for 12 years throughout the United States and Canada before becoming travel content creators.

I love living in Silverton, Oregon, and I also love exploring new places with my family. We’ve road tripped over 30,000 miles across the United States and Western Canada with our six children since their infancy.

I homeschooled our six children for over 10 years, and served on the board of a homeschool co-op for 4 years. Our oldest is now a college student, and the other five children are enrolled in our local public school.

Several members of our family are neurodivergent (gifted, ADHD, cPTSD), and I’ve spent 5+ years learning how to accommodate neurodivergent needs as well as supporting the resultant mental health challenges (anxiety, depression).

I’ve also served as a support group leader and co-director of Pure Life Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports families struggling with sexual addiction.

I write and create video content about family travel and road trips, millennial marriage, general parenting, homeschooling, parenting neurodivergent children, grief, and abuse recovery.

It brings me so much joy when someone reaches out after watching a video or reading a blog post to tell me that my content helped them understand themselves or their loved one better.

Dinkum Tribe is a community focused on neurodivergent families who love life and travel with their kids. We create and share content on our blog, YouTube channel, TikTok, and several other social media platforms.

We’re millennial parents on a quest to enjoy life with our children to the fullest. We’re cultivating authentic living, practical solutions, genuine relationships, and an abundance mindset. We love to share our favorite neurodivergent-friendly travel finds and lifestyle hacks with our community.

We believe that the adventure doesn’t stop when the kids arrive. If anything, it just gets more interesting! Our family of eight is learning the joy of growing and exploring together.

We’re also passionate about working with businesses in the travel industry to help them connect with neurodivergent families and increase accessibility. Some of the ways we do this are by creating blog posts, photography, short-form videos and social media posts.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met Brian, my husband and co-founder, the first week at university. We were both freshmen at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California, and we had both signed up to join the Forensics Team.

I was newly back from being a missionary kid in Jamaica, and I accidentally missed the first Forensics meeting of the year. In that meeting, they had played an icebreaker game that included a question about “Which student here grew up in Jamaica?” Since I was absent, no one could answer the question.

So when I arrived late to the meeting the next week (due to a previous class that ran overtime), the professor introduced me to everyone as “Here’s our Jamaican connection.” I plunked myself down in an available seat behind a blond guy.

At the end of the meeting, the guy in front of me turned to me and said, “You’re from Jamaica?!” Obviously, I don’t look like the stereotypical Jamaican to American eyes, so his surprise wasn’t unusual. I said yes, and Brian started asking me all about my life in Jamaica.

We ran into each other a few times on campus over the next few weeks. Since neither of us knew very many people on campus yet, we sat together whenever we ran into each other in chapel or at lunch.

Our first long conversation was a few days after the first Forensics meeting. I went to go hang out with one of the guys I met during freshmen orientation, who happened to be living in the same campus housing as Brian.

While I was waiting for my other friend to meet me, Brian walked out into the lobby and immediately struck up conversation with me. We both connected so deeply that when my other friend showed up, he had difficulty joining our conversation. Seeing it was a lost cause, he wandered off, while Brian and I chatted nonstop for a couple of hours.

A few weeks later, the Forensics Coach assigned Brian and I as debate partners because of our complementary skill sets. I was an experienced debater from my school in Jamaica, and Brian was an experienced public speaker from his Junior Statesman of America club at high school.

Our partnership quickly demonstrated to us and the rest of the team that we worked excellently together. We quickly became the top novice debate team at our university and took home awards at every competition.

Being debate partners has a lot of parallels for being marriage partners and business partners. We have similar communication styles and we discovered that our values were strongly aligned in many life areas.
To the surprise of none of our teammates, by the end of the year, we were dating. Four years later in 2005, we got married, and we’ve been happily debating ever since!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

One of the hardest things about being in a creative field is how success is measured. The time and effort you put into a project is in no way correlated to how much you will actually be able to monetize the project.

As a social media manager and creator, I can strategize content that I think is creative, inspirational, or helpful, but it doesn’t take off or generate much of a response. I can spend weeks on a blog post only to find that no one reads it.

Conversely, I’ve gone viral with content that I filmed standing on the side of the road, completely unscripted, and full of mistakes! There’s no rhyme or reason to it much of the time.

So often when you work with a client that’s paying you for your creative work, they have no idea how many years it’s taken to build the skills needed to create your work. It can make me second-guess my abilities and the value of my work when they balk at my prices, even if the prices are market value.

Eventually I had to come to the point of knowing that I put my best effort into my creative work, and it will resonate with the right people. If it doesn’t connect with some people, that’s okay because they’re not my target audience.

I have to remember that at the end of the day, I take photos, and write, and create content, because I love the experience and I want to share it with others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dinkumtribe.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dinkumtribe/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dinkumtribe/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DinkumTribe
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@dinkumtribe

Image Credits

Brian Warren
Jennifer Warren