An Interview with Jazlyn Compton

By Sarina Smith

Jazlyn Compton is a dedicated student who is part of our collateral team. She is a passionate advocate for young women and children, taking on roles at nonprofits whenever she can.

“The reason I wanted to join collateral is because I've done some management projects with other nonprofits like Susan G. Komen, Turn Up Activism, Girl Up, and DemocraShe,” Jazlyn told me. “For DemocraShe, I was a student mentor and a regular volunteer, which meant that I would mentor high school girls as a college student and set them up for voter registration drives at their school.” 

Jazlyn’s experience at Girl Up in particular also helped prepare her for for this job. “I was secretary and vice president, so I managed a lot of events similar to how I'm doing with this job where I'm overseeing different teams,  committees and focusing on different events and initiatives.  I felt really empowered by all of those experiences, especially being a young leader too, and having them set me up to be in a place where I'm taken seriously and I'm able to actually manage things and collaborate with a lot of people. I think that's something really special to have not just outside of school, but even in school, like it's nice to be able to apply that to my learning now rather than pushing it off and waiting to entertain with that post-graduation employment.” 

Jazlyn has a personal connection to the goal our particular nonprofit, making her work extra meaningful. “I'm really excited to meet the kids, to put it plainly. I grew up in a low income neighborhood where my own school didn't have the best library and the schools next to me didn't even have libraries, and that was in Florida. And, you know, we're seeing this in Massachusetts, where education ranks super high. I'm ready to see as college students how we can enhance their experience to be better than ours, or just as good as the elementary school experiences we had.” 

She also understands how important it is to remain educated through literature. “You know, no matter who you are, you remember being in a library as a little kid. You remember picking up a book and you're going to have a good association with that or you're going to have a really negative association with that. And I think that is just great, how we can all share our different experiences and set up the next generation to be leaders, excited to read and excited to get engaged.” 

When I asked what Jazlyn had coming up next for her team, she said “What we're really planning on doing next is focusing on this impact report. We want to make sure that everyone's work in this isn't going unnoticed because small tasks make a huge impact. So if there's a way that we can track this progress and, you know, be able to prepare that to pass it off to people next year, and make this a more sustainable initiative, then I think that's what we really want to focus on. I'm really excited to accomplish that with them.”