Joe Hawkins & Jeff Meyers: Oakland LGBTQ CC

Guests:

Jeff Myers, is co-founder of Oakland LGBTQ Community Center Inc. and Board President. Jeff was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been a resident of Oakland for 16 years and is deeply dedicated to the Oakland LGBTQ Community. He has worked as a neurologic surgery scrub nurse at the University of California, San Francisco for 16 years and holds the title of Principal Surgical Technologist. In this position, he serves as an important patient care advocate in the operating room. He is also a preceptor for new employees in a variety of surgical specialties and is one of the original scrub nurses on the UCSF surgical stereotactic movement disorder team that performs craniotomies for deep brain stimulation (DBS) and the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. 

Joe Hawkins, is co-founder of the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center Inc. and is its first Executive Director. He is also a noted Oakland California based community organizer and has been at the forefront of LGBTQ advocacy in the Bay Area for almost 30 years. Joe is a seasoned non-profit executive, event producer and social entrepreneur. Joe first came to national prominence as a gay activist and one of the first out gay men to appear as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1989, defending his right to parent his then 6-year-old son. Among his many accomplishments, Joe has helped to manage multiple nonprofit organizations with multi-million dollar budgets. He was the Director of Administration for AIDS Project of The East Bay and served on the Ryan White Planning Committee. He went on to become a founding member and organizer of The East Bay AIDS Walk working in collaboration with the Starbucks corporation.