Jammin Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1961 and spent her earliest years living in East New York as the middle child of four siblings– two brothers and one sister. From her youth into adolescence, her life was marked by tremendous shifts, namely the death of caregivers and the need to relocate and create a new sense of home that accompanied those losses. Upon the sudden death of her mother at age 8 from sickle cell anemia, Jammin was raised by her grandmother until high school, when her grandmother passed away due to breast cancer. That same year, Jammin and her siblings moved to Los Angeles to live with their uncle. After graduating from high school, she remained in Los Angeles, attending the University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated with a degree in Political Science. Not long after college, Jammin returned to her first home of New York City, where she met her husband and went on to have three daughters. While raising her three girls, Jammin began to build a career in the education field, serving as a guidance counselor at a school for students with special needs and later, as an early intervention specialist while earning her Master’s in Education from Brooklyn College. In 1997, Jammin and her husband divorced, ushering her into a new chapter. She purchased a home in Flatbush, where she would raise her young daughters, and pivoted to working for the New York City Department of Human Services, where she remained until her retirement in 2020. That year, amidst the pandemic, Jammin relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, and made a second career pivot– becoming a certified postpartum doula. While this marked a new career, it also represented a return to a larger throughline in her life’s work: a deep commitment to the health of children and supporting families tasked with rearing them