Dawn Stueckle
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Dawn has worked with young people in San Francisco for more than two decades, starting campus-based girls’ support groups at Lincoln High School and A.P. Giannini Middle School in the early 1990s and co-founding in 1992 the organization that would later become Sunset Youth Services. In addition to providing leadership for the nonprofit, managing staff, connecting with donors, and building relationships with young people served by Sunset Youth Services, Dawn partners with numerous community coalitions and city agencies as an advisor, change agent, and voice for the disenfranchised youth of the city.
In 2018 Dawn was elected to co-chair the Juvenile Justice Providers Association (JJPA)–– a consortium of community-based organizations that she helped establish in 2004 and which plays an important role in local policy-making, youth advocacy and has a strong voice in how funds are used to meet the needs of vulnerable youth.
Happy New Year in Pandemic
We are living through a pandemic, really dark times, in a world that doesn't feel safe. Our lives have been disrupted, interrupted, and threatened. But they haven't stopped. And so, without the big events and traditions, we must turn to the little things. And ask ourselves why they matter.
How We Made This Video
Our team of youth and staff spent several weeks in December 2020, writing down a single moment of our day-- a moment when everything comes together exactly as it should or a moment where everything falls apart. Perfectly perfect or perfectly terrible. Later, we dissected the moments, extracted the meaning, and rewrote the lines, trying to make sense of our collective experiences.
Each of us spent time (off Zoom!) practicing our camera work, capturing glimpses of the city surrounding us, building a cinematic B roll library. Those visuals help illustrate the collaborative poem, "Hella Hellacious 2020." Produced for the Upstar Records Winter 2020 Showcase.
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