SJL SPONSORED AAPI ORGANIZATIONS

Stop AAPI Hate and Little Tokyo Service Center are active 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organizations.

SJL SPOTLIGHT: JASON JEMERA

UPENN Psychiatric Mental Health NP-candidate & Founder of Your Mind; Your Narrative Podcast | Philadelphia, PA

Before the USF degree, before the years as a UCLA nurse, before the UPENN graduate degree: I identify as a Bay Area raised first-generation child of Filipino immigrants. I am a product of environments marked by poverty, street violence, substance use, and mental illness. I am an activist who chooses to heal my community with psychiatry and education as my tools.

As children of immigrants, we are often taught to “be quiet,” “tough it out,” and “focus on your studies [and/or] money.” Our elders came from struggles separate from ours, in which building a livelihood for us was the focus, so I don’t blame them for instilling this. But our generations moving forward must understand that when we choose to silence ourselves, then we are holding onto our trauma – we hold onto poison. And this continues to live in us until we do the work to address, express, and grow from it.

Psychiatric mental health care should be seen as a forward-thinking field of progressive policy. We know that housing safety, financial stability, access to care, recognition of social barriers, and childhood trauma are major factors that play into our individual wellbeing. My journey into this field is my means of bridging the gap between my background in clinical science with my passion for social justice and community advocacy.

The same city where Angelo Quinto’s life was taken, is the same city I lost my best friend to a bullet. My late-brother Jibril was a child of Nigerian immigrants. The two of us constantly envisioned ourselves in positions where we could uplift our communities. Black and Asian solidarity was natural to my upbringing, just as it was in the founding of Social Justice League. It’s a narrative not told enough. We share a resilience that molds us to become champions in advocating the needs of our community and amplifying the voices of those on the ground doing the work, by any means necessary.

This year, virtual connections became a significant means. From my Philly apartment, I connected across states with the Social Justice League (SJL) in LA and Impact6 in Oakland. Through webcam and phone calls, I was able to bring the feminine care drive initiative to Philadelphia, distributing 4000+ feminine care products and branching relationships with UPENN’s directors of Global Women’s Health and the Community Champions with No More Secrets, a premier nonprofit organization that battles period poverty daily and has established the country’s first menstrual health hub in Philly.

As we continue to see social media used as an echo chamber of trauma and hatred, I want to remind loved ones that it can be used as a place of healing, learning, and engagement into our community. Inspired to create a space in which my BIPOC community can hear one of their own sharing mental health knowledge and how it intersects with real-life cultural experiences, I created the podcast series “Your Mind; Your Narrative.” 

In addition to this passion project, I currently work in a crisis response center, and I plan to continue working within inner city mental health populations throughout my lifetime. Seeing a lack of representation in the leadership positions of academics and healthcare, I aspire to complete my PhD, run a mental health clinic, and become a university dean one day. As a Filipino-American, I lacked seeing figures who looked like me in the places I wanted to navigate, so I decided to just become that person – for myself and my community.