Jasmine’s Journey: Still Laughing With Girls, Still Building What Comes Next
Before Jasmine Deacon was PEARLS’ Director of Program Services, helping shape programming for girls across Milwaukee, she was a quiet kid who noticed everything.
“Can you believe that?” she laughs. “I was very quiet, very observant.”
The youngest of three, Jasmine learned early by watching her older siblings move through the world. She remembers being the kid who noticed when something didn’t feel right, and often said something about it.
“I was definitely an activist,” she says. “I always enjoyed advocating or saying when something wasn’t right.”
Even as a bitty girl, the foundation was there: Curiosity. Empathy. A strong sense of fairness. A desire to understand people.
What Jasmine didn’t know yet was how those qualities would eventually lead her to PEARLS, or that PEARLS would become the place that helped bring them fully to the surface.
After high school at Riverside University High School, where Jasmine participated in everything from track to student government and ultimately became senior class president, her path eventually took her to Mount Mary University to study social work.
She initially imagined a career advocating for patients and families in hospitals. Then a professor suggested an internship.
“I think that PEARLS is a really good match for you,” Jasmine remembers her saying. “I think you’re really gonna enjoy this internship.”
She sure did. “I loved it.”
What struck Jasmine wasn’t simply the mission. It was the way people interacted with one another and, in turn, with the girls.
She encountered adults who cared deeply but they definitely weren’t performing perfection. They offered young people honesty instead.
“I had finally been around people that had a genuine interest in you and gave very real advice.”
That authenticity changed something for her.
“PEARLS was the first time that I actually saw adults laugh with girls,” she says.
It sounds simple but it certainly wasn’t. Jasmine had grown up believing relationships between adults and young people came with a firm dividing line. Adults instructed and then kids listened.
At PEARLS, she saw something different. Adults could laugh with girls. Listen to them. Tell the truth. Admit they were tired. Redirect them when necessary. Challenge them. And still hold the expectation that everyone in the circle mattered.
“Ten years later,” Jasmine laughs, “here I am. Still laughing with girls.”
Jasmine’s original PEARLS internship lasted one semester. But PEARLS wasn’t quite finished with her.
After graduating and completing another social work experience, Jasmine knew adolescent development and advocacy were where she belonged. When a Program Coordinator position opened at PEARLS, a phone call eventually came.
She joined the team in 2016 and then she just kept growing.
Program Coordinator became Lead Program Coordinator. Leadership expanded. She managed teams, trained facilitators, helped support groups and advocated for new organizational structures when she saw something PEARLS needed.
Eventually, she stepped into program management and then into leadership as Director of Program Services.
Looking back, Jasmine sees a pattern.
“People see something in me that I have not yet discovered,” she says of PEARLS. “And even in my path of discovering that, they still trust me.”
That trust didn’t mean she was never challenged. Quite the opposite.
“I had a lot of folks that learned me in here, and I’m grateful for every single conversation—even in the moment where I didn’t get it.”
Leaders pushed Jasmine to consider perspectives beyond her own. What did an issue look like to a girl? A coworker? A partner? A director? Someone whose priorities were completely different from hers? This practice transformed her leadership.
“You have to be able to really see everything 360.”
PEARLS also kept asking something of the girl who had spent so much of childhood observing before speaking: To use her voice. Eventually, Jasmine moved from waiting to see what everyone else thought to being willing to say, “Since no one else will go, I’ll kick us off.”
That evolution mirrors what happens in PEARLS groups every week.
“You know we can see you, right?” she remembers learning. “Your contribution is valuable.”
That belief remains at the center of PEARLS programming as the organization prepares to launch another school year.
Today, PEARLS supports youth identifying as girls in 5th through 12th grade through free, voluntary groups meeting at schools, community locations and the PEARLS office.
But describing PEARLS only by the activities girls do misses something important. Jasmine describes it as a place where girls can arrive without having everything figured out.
“To be who they are,” she says. “To arrive not needing to have the answers to all of the questions.”
Inside PEARLS groups, girls build relationships, explore who they are, develop social-emotional skills, strengthen confidence, talk honestly about life and begin imagining what their futures might look like.
And increasingly, PEARLS’ College & Career Readiness work is beginning earlier. Instead of asking a fifth grader to declare exactly what she wants to be when she grows up, Jasmine wants girls to first have room to discover themselves.
“I think the days of asking youth at fifth grade, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’—girl, let’s let her figure out if her favorite color is really pink or if it is purple, if it’s orange, whatever it is. Just give her time to develop.”
Maybe she loves creating. Maybe she loves cooking. Maybe she loves solving problems, caring for people, building things, debating, performing or organizing.
Start there. Then help her connect those discoveries to possibility.
“It’s taking time for girls to really figure out and discover what path forward—and to really blaze that path themselves.”
At the center of all of it are relationships with trusted adults.
“The people that are on this team, through and through, display characteristics of what a trusted adult is,” Jasmine says.
And the PEARLS values: Personal Responsibility, Empathy, Awareness, Respect, Leadership and Support, aren’t simply lessons delivered to girls.
“We model those things in office and in groups. We’re all held to that same standard.”
That is why the circle matters.
“It’s truly reciprocal.”
As fall programming begins, Jasmine feels something she’s especially eager to name:
“I’m actually truly excited for groups to start this year.”
PEARLS staff spent the summer intentionally preparing for the fall and spring programming seasons, building structure, experiences and opportunities designed around what today’s girls need.
“We have so much to give girls. We have so many experiences lined up for girls. We just want the girls to come.”
And Jasmine is ready for all of it.
“I cannot wait to see their shining faces. I can’t wait to hear about their school days. I can’t wait to hear about the teacher that gets on your nerves—or your favorite teacher, locker decoration, all of the things.”
A returning PEARLS Girl is not exactly the same girl who left group in spring.
“She has grown and developed over the summer,” Jasmine says. “I just can’t wait to see what they’re going to teach us.”
That curiosity is central to Jasmine’s vision for the future of PEARLS. After more than a decade inside the organization, she has seen PEARLS evolve through different leaders, teams, structures and generations of girls. She doesn’t want that evolution to stop.
“Girls need modernization. They need for this to continue to evolve. They need innovation, they need consistency, they need all of those things.”
Her job, as she sees it, is not to preserve one version of PEARLS forever. It is to stay close enough to girls to understand what the next version needs to become.
“I have to be in tune with what’s happening with the groups. I have to be in tune with what’s happening with the girls, the schools, the political landscape…because I have to intentionally shape what the experience is going to be like.”
The goal is ultimately simple and enormous at the same time: More girls getting the chance to experience a place where they can belong, question, laugh, struggle, grow and discover themselves.
Jasmine imagines a future where “every girl that wants to be a PEARLS Girl…will have the opportunity to.”
Not because girls need someone to swoop in and rescue them.
“You can’t just throw a cape on and save these girls,” Jasmine says. “They don’t want to be saved.”
They need something more human than that.
A circle.
Consistency.
People willing to listen.
People who celebrate the giant milestones and sometimes the fact that you finally cleaned your room.
A place where adults are willing to be real.
A place that sees something in you before you can completely see it yourself.
Jasmine knows a little something about what that can do...after all, PEARLS did it for her.
And more than a decade later, she’s still here making sure another girl gets the same chance to discover what has been inside her all along.
Thank you, Jasmine, for bringing your laughter and acceptance to PEARLS.
With gratitude,
The PEARLS Team
