Youth Charity Lead
Jess Smith
Jess is a brave young person raised by a single mother in the heart of Sydney, Australia who has previously, and still presently grasping an understanding of modern life.
Despite personal struggles, Jess has built her long-driven dream of wildlife conservation into a reality, currently studying at The University of Sydney in combination with Taronga Zoo. Animal behaviour, welfare, and training in real-life practices through her dog walking (and loving animals!), provides Jess the knowledge of what an integral connection is, one with a moral approach, incorporating her societal and environmental surroundings.
Jess’ experience of domestic violence in combination with an increasingly prevalent eating disorder has been shadowed by her determination for her life’s passions. Building and connecting with young people is her key objective, as Jess believes in being more realistic and compassionate helps to exacerbate others’ potential.
Through direct interaction with the pressures of young people’s lives, Jess has been able to understand external influences and become a grain of sand to her own and others purpose and potential. Working closely with the GEM Method has freed a deep-founded understanding of personal connections to overwhelming concerns that have formed a “glass barrier” between ones-self and reality.
Board Members
ANGÉ WEINRABE
Founder of Gem
Angé Weinrabe has worked with young adults who were labelled as disenfranchised and “difficult” by the mainstream systems for the past twenty years. Angé found most of these youth to be extremely bright young people! Her work is to provide informed decision-support to these individuals, as well as to engage with various institutions, and public and private sectors, to re-connect willing young people with others who are like-minded.
Over the years of working with individuals, Angé found that the young person’s inner voice had either been silenced over time, or that it remained unexpressed – for various reasons, leading them to feel frustrated and anxious at a critical time point in their lives. Taking this key aspect into account, Angé developed the GEM Method, or what she’s academically termed – “Culture as Interaction”. This approach ensures that young adults – who are seeking the support – gain it at the right time and feel safe enough to start re-connecting with their local community. Through this process they are able to learn how to develop their cultural repertoire or toolkit – a skillset that will help them in their daily lives.
As an outcome of the GEM Model, skills and decision-support services have been provided to young people, enabling a vast number of individuals to flourish in their lives (relationships, employment, and study). In Angé’s experience, creative young people are at times misunderstood – by their parents, their teachers, and also by the society around them. Young people, especially creative young adults today, are more stressed than ever, mainly because they require simple – as opposed to complicated support mechanisms to guide them in their overall decision-making.
This “æffective” meaningful approach fuels Angé’s dedication to assist young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives. Holding an Arts (Adv.) Hons. Degree in Philosophy, The University of Sydney, and a Masters in Philosophy from the Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney Medical School, in 2020 Angé researched and published an hypothesis that dysregulated emotion (mainly anxiety) impairs decision-making in youth. In 2021, Angé with co-author Prof. Ian B. Hickie published a Review on the Impact of Emotional Dysregulation on Adolescent Decision-Making.
Angé is currently enrolled in a PhD, still at the University of Sydney, where she aims to explore the critical role of culture when investigating the two main explanatory models of addiction – the Medical and Social Models. Her passion is to continue to translate and apply her academic research, as well as sharing the empirical outcomes of GEM’s programs (GEM Method) and tools (music) to the public.
Angé’s long term aim is to align GEM with WHO 2030 goals in order to target Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD’s) and its projected thirty-year effect on the health sector and global economy, and with the WHO 2004 (Affective Interventions and Policies) goals, in their call to find innovative ways to address the Prevention of Mental Ill-Health. Her forthcoming and current publications can be accessed online.
Importantly, through GEM, Angé’s vision is to eventually bring free, effective, and accessible decision-support products and services through technology to young people globally, putting them in charge of their lives.
Samuel Werrett
Samuel Werrett holds a BA Commerce, University of Sydney, and is a proven commercial business manager with specialisations in accounting, finance, great coffee, and conversation. After graduating in 2014, Sam saw an opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of business and opened an espresso bar in Chatswood. Starting from just a concept, “The Steam Engine” is a successfully operating business with a mobile business component, and acclaimed Australia’s 15th Top Cafe by beanhunter.com in 2017.
Sam has worked at The Galileo Group in the property development team where he guided projects from inception to completion and learnt valuable skills in research, feasibility and analysis, and project management.
Sam, himself a young creative also directs My Sound Technology Pty Ltd, GEM Connect’s sister company, created to develop affordable and effective music as health intervention. With entrepreneurial and active roles in these companies combined, Sam supports his peers and other youth worldwide.
Atteqa Malik
Atteqa is a freelance digital artist, cultural operator, and founder member of the Karachi Biennale Trust. She graduated with an MA in Media Studies from the New School University, New York, in 2002. Atteqa has organised a number of workshops and activities for the Karachi public related to new media since February 2008. She was on the International Review Committee for ISEA (International Summit of Electronic Art) 2010 held in Ruhr, Germany. Her submission to imagining New Eurasia Project was selected and displayed with 88 artists at the Asian Cultural Center in Korea and online until July 2016.
As Co-Founder of Karachi Biennale Trust, Atteqa coordinated educational and art collaborations between Karachi institutions and Berlin artist Wolfgang Spahn, architect Stephen Kovats, Manchester Art Gallery, The Tetley, and Canadian media artist Faisal Anwar. During KB19, Global Outreach collaborated with GEM, who provided (GEMAH) an Arts & Health Program, delivered to 40 creative young people in Karachi.
Tom Cochrane
Tom is a philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mind and aesthetics. He is also a musician (piano) and has a master’s degree in music composition. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2007 for a thesis arguing that musical performances can generate collective emotions. Over the next 10 years he worked at universities in Geneva, Belfast, Sheffield, and York. He began his current post at Flinders University in Adelaide in 2018.
Tom is the lead editor of the multi-disciplinary volume The Emotional Power of Music (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the author of The Emotional Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and The Aesthetic Value of the World (Oxford University Press, 2021). Click here to access more of his recent contributions to academic and other scholarship.
Samridhi Purohit
A proud part of team GEM, Samridhi is a published author, multidimensional channel of sound and light, an executive coach, Learning and Organisational Development leader, and a giggly eternal child in a grown up body!
Calling Sydney her home for a few years now, Samridhi occasionally misses her spicy street food from Bangalore, India where she grew up.
Through her work in the corporate world, she has empowered over 7000 professionals to harness their inner wisdom, authentic self, balanced leadership, and peak performance. She has worked with organisations ranging from top Fortune 500 companies to small and medium scale retail, insurance and hospitality businesses across the world. At the heart of it all, what drives her passion is bringing out the more wholesome and productive versions in people and teams.
As a healing arts practitioner, she’s a Galactic Akashic Records reader recommended by Debbie Solaris, the Galactic Historian we love to watch on Gaia TV and other spiritual forums. Through her sessions, she co-creates the alignment of galactic songlines and storylines with her Galactic Akashic access, Light Language, Living Sound Light System attunements and all practices she has been initiated in through the years.
Jacinta Bailey
Jacinta is a passionate advocate for Indigenous self-determination, educational empowerment, gender equality and social inclusion. An adept researcher and avid traveller, she is motivated to achieve community-driven solutions and create sustainable change, in local and global contexts.
Jacinta graduated from the University of Technology in 2018 and has recently been selected as Australia’s WISE Emerging Leader by the Qatar Foundation. Jacinta is now completing her Master’s Degree in Policy Making in South Carolina in the United States.
GEM Ltd wishes to give special thanks to all those young volunteers and paid contractors in Australia and abroad who have helped build the GEM brand since its start-up, and who have supported their peers in the process.
