Dameyonna Willis, 27, is the Founder of Queen IAM, a Girl Empowerment Organization founded in 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. Dameyonna was recently awarded the Young Adult Philanthropist Honoree from Cleveland Soul of Philanthropy. She has a Live Exhibit of her contributions and efforts to the community located in the main branch Cleveland Public Library. Dameyonna is a busy but balanced mommy to two small children. She loves spending time with my family and creating memories. Queen IAM’s goals are to expose young ladies to future possibilities. While still supporting and guiding young queens through the daily challenges of being a young lady. Dameyonna’s journey started off as providing programming in the different communities in libraries and rec centers all over Cleveland. She travels to schools and youth organizations interacting and engaging with young girls. She has created a curriculum and activities to teach young queens all about self-love.
“Generosity is the ability to share an abundance of your time and talents to help others.”
The mission of Queen IAM is to Empower, Enrich and Educate young ladies everywhere. Queen IAM was created today to promote and encourage self-love, self-respect, and self-understanding. We will provide mentorship, workshops, and events designed to inspire individual growth. Queen IAM’s goal is to encourage young queens to know their self-worth, so they will grow into strong, confident, and beautiful women. We have created safe spaces for many girls to bond and create sisterhood. We work extremely hard to expose our young queens to opportunities to grow socially and emotionally such as our highlight on self-love. Self-respect and self-understanding. We use our tools and resources to then connect them to areas of College and Career Readiness, Health and Wellness, Financial Literacy, Community Service. Queen IAM has grown bigger than she ever imagines, from recreation centers to large auditoriums filled with 100’s of girls. Something that makes Queen IAM different is us consistently in the community. Despite the Pandemic, Queen IAM decided to transition our in-person programming into a virtual space, Queen in Quarantine was born. This project is ongoing, and the current schedule is twice a month a different workshop is held. The workshops include the opportunities to connect with local women-focused businesses that share their skills from Zumba, Sewing, and Upcycling. We created ways to be creative and engaged with the young queens in our community. We provided hands-on projects for the young queens to participate in with creating a safe space for them to build sisterhoods and thrive with self-development.
