Executive Director, Jacksonville Area Sexual, Minority Youth Network Inc. (JASMYN)
Mission
JASMYN’s mission is to support and empower lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and questioning youth by creating safe space, providing youth development services and bringing people and resources together to promote diversity and human rights.
Serving Jacksonville
JASMYN was founded in Jacksonville in 1993 by a teen who had been suicidal and understood the need for peer support. He began holding teen support groups in the public library for LGBT youth.
We were incorporated in 1994 and opened our youth center in the Riverside area in 1998. We now enroll more than 300 youth each year and offer a wide range of support groups, HIV and health promotion and safety net services for youth in the center and provide support and leadership training to students organizing Gay Straight Alliances in their schools.
We also offer training and advocacy on LGBT issues in the community. We help LGBT youth survive when their schools and neighborhoods are harsh and harassing. We also help them thrive and grow into healthy and productive adults.
As the longest operating LGBT community center in Jacksonville (16 years), JASMYN provides leadership in the city on gay and lesbian issues by bringing people together to make positive changes that improve the lives of our young people.
Those served
JASMYN provides support and services to teens from all counties in Northeast Florida and occasionally Gainesville, Lake City, Daytona Beach, and from southeast Georgia, including Brunswick. We are the only LGBT youth center in North Florida and South Georgia and JASMYN is known around the country as an innovative LGBT youth center with a comprehensive array of youth programs and as an advocate for youth in foster care and educational settings.
Biggest challenge
One of the biggest challenges I encounter is lack of understanding for our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people. I try to bring respect and civility to every conversation because I know everyone doesn’t see eye-to-eye on these issues. I also know that the vast majority of folks in Jacksonville would never condone the harassment and violence that some of our LGBT youth experience. I look for places where we can all find common ground. In my work I have had the opportunity to learn that many people in our city stand for basic respect toward others, and for making a place for every young person in our community, regardless of their differences.
Biggest satisfaction
I know JASMYN is saving lives. JASMYN has seen more than 20,000 young people since we started in 1993, and I know some of them would not be alive today if they hadn’t found JASMYN and a safe and supportive place to be who they are. Our LGBT youth and community help to make our city a richer and more vibrant place to live. We cannot afford to lose a single young person to bias and rejection.
Hometown
I grew up in the country in upstate South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
First experience with community service
During my college days I was active in the on-campus Service Corps. I helped a campus maintenance worker learn to read, flew kites with kids at the state hospital, started a project to prevent child abuse and became a leader among other student volunteers.
Your job before JASMYN
In the 1990s I worked as a legal assistant at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, where I ran a school-based project for child victims of violence. Before I came to Florida, I was the executive director of a rural women’s center in Vermont and prior to this helped start a battered women’s shelter in Alaska. During my entire career I have worked to make the world a better place for folks who were victimized and marginalized.
Upcoming events
JASMYN sponsors the annual Coming Out Day Breakfast in October each year. In 2010, more than 250 people from 20 corporate and business sponsors attended the event, which featured keynote speaker Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C. Corporate and business sponsorships are available as we begin to plan the 2011 Coming Out Day Breakfast.
Contact information
www.jasmyn.org
389-3857, ext. 205