I was born in Bristol Tennessee and I grew up in Virginia.  So my first three years were in a trailer in a really small town in Southwest Virginia, a very rural area.  I spent the next three years in that same town. And I moved a whole thirty minutes away to the town of Abingdon, Virginia which is where I lived until I moved to Hollins.  Um real rural, real conservative, real white, um… very  Christian, very family oriented, there are some things that are amazing about where I lived. 

We didn’t lock our doors.  I still sometimes have a hard time remembering to lock my own car door because this is not how I grew up.  So there was all of that kind of good stuff.  There was family close by.  I literally spent my childhood playing in the woods or hanging out with the residents of my dad’s nursing home because we lived right behind my dad’s nursing home.  So there was a lot of things that I really loved about where I grew up but some of that real white real conservative real Christian real “we’re all the same and if you are different there’s something wrong” a lot of that was pretty difficult for me.  And I didn’t have language for that growing up there was just this sense of like “this ain’t me and I don’t know what’s wrong here but this is not quite right something needs to change here.”  And it really wasn’t until I was probably later on in high school that I started realizing “Oh (laughs) there is a different world and we all don’t have to look like this”

My mom was a first grade teacher until I was born and then she stayed at home with my sister and I. (more serious tone) My dad was an Amway salesman and he was a social worker and then he had three nursing homes that he owned and operated. And that was really his life’s passion. He was very very good at what he did.  He was good at being a business person.  He was also very skilled at working with the residents at the nursing home. My mom taught my sister and I at home for three years and both my parent were really engaged in their church. Doing well in school was prized in my family and so a lot of the ways that I’ve become the person I’ve become .I mean my parents didn’t teach it to me but they gave me the tools that I could learn what I wanted to learn.

:(I went to) Kings College in Bristol Tennessee. You prayed before every class.  Women were there to get husbands, (laughs) it scared me.  But that’s really where I went.  Um because I was told to go to a Christian college or we won’t pay for it.  So I dropped out and said, “forget this I’m not in the mood to go to school, maybe I’m just not meant for college.”  My parents  after a year of me working at a truck stop thought, “Hmm maybe she should get to pick the next college.”  And my best friend was coming here and so I moved here to go to school because I’d came to visit her a few times.  It was the only school I applied to .

I developed the independent projects part of SHARE.  And became the co-chair of the independent project (both laughing). Which just translated into the fact that I got to work with refugees and I got to work with an after-school program that I really wanted to go to.  The after school program is West End Center for Youth on Patterson Avenue and then I also was an ESL tutor, English as a Second Language tutor.

West End Center is an after-school program for predominately youth of color for predominately youth of economically disadvantaged backgrounds .There were one hundred youth when I was there. I want to say they are up to one thirty now and I also worked as an English a Second Language tutor for a family from Vietnam.  So I was very involved with the outside community but I wasn’t very involved with the Hollins community.

There is this idea that you speak your mind and you don’t worry about who’s going first and, you know, this idea that your voice actually does matter. That’s definitely something that I credit going to a women’s college that helped develop in me, and develop in me possibly younger or earlier than life than some of my other female friends.  That’s something that got instilled in me and that’s something that I am grateful of Hollins for.

I mean I’ve done, I think I’ve had twenty-nine jobs since I was fourteen.  Like I, I’ve had a lot of jobs.  In terms of major jobs the tutoring director position at West End Center that I’ve mentioned and then the school liaison at the refugee office and then when I was in graduate school I was the program coordinator of the group called the United With Youth and it was the leadership development program for teenagers.  Most recently I was the executive director of the organization called North Carolina Lambda Youth Network which was a leadership development and social justice organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender youth- most of whom are youth of color, most of whom are in the fifteen to nineteen block.

I want to be committed to the same things sixty years from now.  I’ll probably approach it differently and I’ll probably look at the world differently.  I mean I hope, lets hope that I continue to grow for the next sixty years by how and what ways I will be affecting my world  and what I'm committed to.

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