Vanessa Jenkins-Young immigrated to the USA in 1980 from Belize. She is a former Queen of the Bay, 1977-78 and the daughter of David and Joan Jenkins of Queen's Square. She is happily married to Klay Young Sr. for 35 years who have two children, Klay Jr. and Kara as well as a grandson, Lucas Marcel Young. She has worked in the field of Rehabilitation Medicine for 26 years and is currently the Senior Associate Director of Rehabilitation Medicine at Health and Hospitals-Bellevue Hospital. She holds a BA in Physical Therapy from Hunter College ('91), a MA in Applied Physiology, ('94) and a Masters' Degree in Public Health, ('99), both from the prestigious Columbia University.

Vanessa is very busy professionally and serves as a credentialed clinical bioethics consultant for the past eleven years. This is something she is really passionate about and hopes to one day promote Bioethics in Belize. She is also the president of the Harlem Independent Living Center, (since 1995) a Federal and State funded agency for people with disabilities. There, she, the board and staff advocate for equal rights in education, jobs, housing, access and voting.

 In 2010, she, along with several of her friends, formed the organization, the Belize Diabetes Association of New York, (aka BDANY) and launched their first fundraising event on July 5th that year. It was founded out of a request for strips for thousands of monitors that were donated to the Belize Diabetes Association. As a clinician who knows that Diabetes Management is more than just monitoring blood glucose levels, she led the charter of a mission and vision for the organization to provide education, supplies, skilled personnel and information to the Belizean community.

  Since then, the BDANY has raised thousands of dollars (via annual fund raising events) which are used to purchase monitors and strips for the outreach events, shipping of barrels to Belize, sponsoring snacks and meals for the participants and sponsoring the tickets of the volunteers, footing all costs related to food, transportation and accommodations when necessary. A typical mission consists of doctors, nurses, Diabetes educators and assistants. They have completed seven missions to Belize, screened and educated over 1,250 participants, made financial donations to the Juvenile Diabetes Camp and the Belize Diabetes Association. They have also educated over 200 clinicians, (doctors, nurses and community health workers).

  

Vanessa remains focused and passionate about the work to be done and would like to conduct a study to focus on sustainable outcomes for the participants, (reduction of their A1C, which is the true measure of how well they are doing with Diabetes management).

In her spare time, Vanessa enjoys trying different cuisines, reading and traveling with her husband.  They have travelled to Dubai, Thailand, Iceland, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Russia. Vanessa continues to be passionate about Belize wishing for peace in her native land and the world and prays for a clean and sustainable earth to leave behind.