Denise Devonish
Denise Devonish has been working in the Gainesville area since 1996. She completed her Bachelor's Degree in Behavioral Analysis and her Master's Degree in Special Education at the University of Florida. She has worked at Tacachale, a developmentally disabled institution in Gainesville as an administrator and a staff trainer. She has also worked as a Protective Services Counselor with the Department of Children and Families as well as a Health Facility Evaluator at the Agency for Health Care Administration. She has owned DMD Health and Safety Training Services since 2014 and co-owned Gainesville Sports Camp since 2017.
Denise moved to the USA from Barbados in 1991 to attend school. She went to Miami Dade Community College and then to the University of Florida. As a young multiracial, foreign woman in Florida, she was exposed to many different cultures and differences within her immediate environment. She witnessed firsthand the complexities of being a non-national multiracial woman in the USA. In her professional experiences, she worked in circumstances that warranted very delicate steps to move through issues with race, socioeconomic inequities and differences in order to improve the work environment for all employees and clients. She acquired skills that helped her understand viewpoints from many different perspectives that then transitioned into helping organizations work through conflicts that occurred as a result of many of these differences.
Joe Smith
Joe Smith is a local church pastor of 20 + years and a personal trainer for three years. He went to a small, conservative Christian College in the Midwest for his Bachelors in Biblical Leadership and has continued to add to his theological education over the years.
He and his family have been in Gainesville since 2012 where Joe was the lead Pastor of a local church. Joe eventually joined to Shift Church where he became the lead pastor.
Joe and Shift Church have been working with the local Pride Center, PFLAG and the Pride Student meet up groups in Gainesville Florida to learn more about their struggles and to help them become more and more integrated in the community.
Throughout his years of working within fundamentalist spaces and then the work of coming out of them, Joe has seen how good intentions can still bring about undesirable consequences. As a result of his work with the LGBTQ+ community in Gainesville he has seen how easy it is to marginalize an entire group of people. He has recognized the importance of listening to others and then first recognizing our own unconscious biases and then correcting them.
In his role as Pastor he has had to listen to many people from with varying differences and has had to help them navigate many obstacles in their lives. His ability to listen, empathize and change his own behaviors has allowed him to learn the skills of unlearning and untangling ingrained biases.