Currently the Jeffry Stijn Foundation consists of an Executive Board and Supervisory Board. Meet the people behind the foundation!
The Founder – Julie
Julie is a renaissance woman. Mental health patient advocate. Certified compliance professional. Avid reader. Amateur writer. Passionate dancer. Animal friend. Life-long student. Free speech proponent. Human rights champion. Devil’s advocate debater.
Dutch by birth and nationality, international by blood, previous residency, education, mind and heart. Fluent in English and Dutch – with a smattering of Papiamento and Spanish. Spoke Mandarin and French at one point.
Most of her work experience is corporate, largely in executive management. Her favorite jobs were ones where social impact, preferably global, was part of the organization. She has been at the inception of multiple companies and departments. Transforming ideas and concepts into concrete initiatives is her jam. She’s an expert at translating between stakeholders and bringing interested parties together.
She also suffers from cPTSD – Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. After decades of experience with this disease, full of trials and tribulations, she started the Jeffry Stijn Foundation to help others navigate their way through mental illness. Her focus is on supporting small communities with few resources, such as Aruba, her current country of residency. She dreams of the day that each small community with limited resources in the world will have access to practical information about mental health, peer-to-peer support, legal aid and patient advocates.
She is the Founder of Just a Regular Julie Consultancy and Co-Founder of Human Rights Activists Aruba.
She also blogs about her experiences living with cPTSD.
Director of (Mental) Health – Dr. Fleur
Medical Doctor, DMP, AIGT (KNMG)
Dr. Fleur is a wife, mother, diving aficionado, loves playing (board) games in good company and has a family dog named Zulu. Dutch by Birth, International by education and interest, she moved to Aruba with her family for personal reasons, and cannot imagine living anywhere else.
She is Fluent in Dutch and English, and is proficient in Papiamento.
She is an advocate for gender equality, access to education and improvement of public health.
She is a medical doctor with a 3-year post-graduate specialization in Tropical Medicine and Global Health (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam).
She has a great amount of experience in General Surgery, Orthopedics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Trauma/Emergency, Pediatrics, and Infectious Diseases.
Prior to coming to Aruba, she worked as Senior Medical Officer at a rural district hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. So she has plenty of experience when it comes to health care in small communities with limited resources.
In Aruba she has worked as a physician in the hospital’s emergency department. She noticed that Aruba is lacking some essential services for the frail, the elderly, and also some essential needs for the undocumented and the other (often forgotten) group of vulnerable women. She is working with UNHCR and UNAIDS for some time to address certain issues.
She’s also worked on Curacao and Bonaire.
She has her own mobile practice, and is also a qualified Medical Dive Physician. She believes the underwater world should be preserved and cared for. The world is at a breaking point and we need to stop the disintegration now!
For the past year Dr. Fleur has been doing second opinions. In that capacity, she has encountered a lot of psychosomatic health problems, and become quite fascinated with this phenomenon.
This is one of the areas in which Dr. Fleur will assist the Jeffry Stijn Foundation for Mental Health and Patient Advocacy.
She is the Founder of Dive Doc Fleur and Co-Founder of Human Rights Activists Aruba.
Chairperson Supervisory Board – Ron
Ronald Wijngaarde (call him Ron) is father of 3 adult kids and, when not working, can usually be found playing beach tennis or on his mountain bike. This keeps him happy and stress-resilient. Ron has lived in Aruba for over 12 years but before Aruba lived in Surinam, Curacao and The Netherlands. As such he is much attuned to cultural differences between countries and has learned to adapt and embrace new cultures quickly.
Ron is Fluent in English, Dutch, Papiamento and gets by in Spanish. Next to his electronics Engineering degree (University of Twente) he has acquired degrees in management and population health management.
Ron has been working with the healthcare industry since his arrival on Aruba. First from the Health Insurance side and later for different Public Health government entities to collect Medical information in order to define policies and procedures. He’s been instrumental (with others) in introducing the use of Electronic Medical Health records and exchanging health information between entities on the island.
Ron now has his own consultancy company promoting the exchange of information (“Make information Flow”) while conforming to privacy compliance regulations.
During an International Health Information Seminar he attended a lecture describing how mental health issues affected and compounded other health problems while being mostly ignored or just barely addressed. Other stories were told about real people struggling with mental health issues while they sometimes could be helped by just simply being recognized and understood by others.
These stories and the fact that those are mostly not being told on Aruba has led Ron to become part of the Jeffry Stijn Foundation to try to do his little part in the recognition and de-stigmatizing of Mental Health.
