Her Story
About Jill
In my professional work that pays my bills, I focus on legislative advocacy in behavioral health policy, child welfare policy, and healthcare policy. I've worked nationwide and in an 8-state region in the Southeast, spending many years in Florida advocating mostly in Health and Human Services with a specialized niche in behavioral health and child welfare. I'm probably in my 26th legislative session now. Some of the policies I've written are considered national model policy and are in other states. My work was recognized as model policy by the Council on State Governments a few years ago and received national awards, particularly related to the opioid epidemic. In my personal life, I was a volunteer guardian ad litem for a few years. After COVID, when the gymnastics training program in my rural county was planning to shut its doors, my partner and I purchased it. It was the only indoor facility in a tri-county area. My vision was to expand beyond gymnastics to create a youth athletic center, a safe place for kids to go on Friday nights, working on sports like volleyball for young girls and strength, agility, speed, and endurance training for young boys. We operate it as a for-profit but choose not to take a penny from it. We keep it open as a safe place for these kids, offering a specialized room for caseworkers, applied behavior analysts, and guardian ad litems to meet with their children and do welfare checks. We offer discounts for foster parents. I saw this as providing a greater reach to young children versus taking on guardian ad litem cases here and there. My undergraduate degree is in political science and my master's is in sports management, so I'm getting the best of both worlds.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jill
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I received is to read the statute and the law, know what the law says, because not everything you hear and not everything that you read in the papers is really true. Start attending meetings - every state has coordinating councils on issues you're passionate about, whether it's substance abuse, mental health, education, or other topics. There are quarterly meetings led by state agencies or advocacy groups. Start getting involved with that and listen. If it's education, start going to your local school board meetings and hearing what they have to say, and understand what they have facing. Take the time to really understand the context and why that law was in place or why that rule was in place. For example, this year in my county, the school board wanted to pass a policy requiring Level 2 background screening for every volunteer. I pulled the statutes because I knew the law since I worked on it, went to the school board meeting, listened to everything, and then testified. As a result, they pushed it back because they realized the vast impacts that weren't really thought through.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would look locally and regionally on who does it well and ask them if you can come be with them, shadow them, sit down and have coffee or lunch with them. One of the things that I do a lot for women in the political sphere is I'll sit down with them - I'm an all-boats rise person, you know? Let's lift everybody up instead of being so competitive with each other. I'll walk them through the entire legislative process, pitfalls, mistakes I made early on and what it cost me and how I had to rebuild. I'll show them how to negotiate complex policy that benefits everyone, how to look at legislation from multiple perspectives because it may be great for one industry but there might be unintended consequences. I teach them how to ask the right people about those unintended consequences and how you can leverage each other to support each other on a larger legislative package that can push through. That's what I've done for about 15 years. When I started, there weren't a lot of female lobbyists, not a lot of women in the process, and those that were were so marginalized - it was a boy's world. It took many years to get around that and power through. I did it because it was something I believed in, and it was hard, but I kept doing it. I kept coming back every year. Now when you look at the Florida legislature and who the registered advocacy groups are led by, there's a lot of women there now, and it is so cool to see, especially in the healthcare space.
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