Elayne Bennett

Elayne Bennett "developed the Best Friends program in 1987, and due to the overwhelming demand for a boys' program, she launched Best Men in 2000. She earned her B.A. and M.Ed. from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Mrs. Bennett serves as the President and Founder of the Best Friends Foundation. In addition to teaching the Foundation's abstinence curriculum and training educators throughout the country, Mrs. Bennett serves as a spokeswoman on issues of adolescent behavior and development.

"She has appeared on several national television shows, in which the Best Friends and Best Men programs were showcased as solutions to teen pregnancy, including ABC Nightline, CBS The Early Show, PBS To the Contrary, Fox News The O'Reilly Factor, ABC World News Tonight, and NBC The Today Show. Her speeches and collected writings have contributed to the books Giving Back by Merrill J. Oster and Mike Hamel, Restoring the Teenage Soul by Margaret Meeker, M.D., Building a Healthy Society by Editor Don Eberly, and Great American Conservative Women, by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. She has given testimony on preventing teen pregnancy before the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight in the House of Representatives, the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means, and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations.

"Mrs. Bennett has been honored with the prestigious Jefferson Award for Education, the John Carroll Society Award, and the William E. Simon Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. She is the wife of William J. Bennett and the mother of two sons.“