Meet our Founder & Clinical Director
Jay Tekulvē Jackson-Vann, LMFT
Jay Tekulvē Jackson-Vann is a native of Milledgeville, Georgia. He was educated in the Baldwin County Public Schools from 1st-5th grades before enrolling in Georgia Military College Prep School, where he was a 1999 Graduate with Distinction. Following High School, he seized the opportunity to share his faith by serving as a full-time missionary in East Lansing, Michigan. It was while ministering to the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan that he felt the impression to change his college major from Speech and Language Pathology to Marriage and Family Studies. Tekulvē earned a BS in Marriage, Family, and Human Development with an emphasis in Family Life Education from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and an MS in Marriage and Family Therapy from Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. His doctoral studies include Medical Family Therapy at Northcentral University in Prescott, Arizona and Health Sciences at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, DC. He holds active licenses as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Utah, Georgia, and Nevada. He is an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church, where he uses his nearly three decades of ministerial experience to assist those in faith transitions and those facing the conflict between religious faith and sexual identity to find peace and belonging in their individual relationships with God. A Master Teacher, Storyteller, and Clinician, he is proud practitioner of Narrative Therapy. He is also a co-founder of The Black Clinicians, Secretary of the Board of Directors of My Children’s Hope. His clinical interests and outreach include medical family therapy, divorce and remarriage, substance abuse, adolescents, and LGBT issues, particularly those impacting Queer people of color. He has said repeatedly, “Though I have had a career spanning nearly two decades and a ministry spanning nearly three, there is no greater joy or accomplishment than that that I have felt and achieved as a son, brother, uncle, father to my five amazing children, and loving partner. I’m far too lucky to feel cheated and far too blessed to believe that it’s luck.”