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Nancy Douyon 
As a child, Nancy Douyon, 17, says, “I wanted to be different” from other people. At first she wanted to be a doctor. “Now I want to be an engineer because I’m able to design things in my own unique way, with my own ideas. The Clubhouse made me unafraid to make mistakes and try new things.” She also overcame her shyness. “I learned to be more comfortable with the other Clubhouse members,” she says. “Now, I walk up to new people and introduce myself, like people did with me when I first got to the Clubhouse.”
In fact, as a featured speaker at the 10th anniversary Clubhouse celebration on November 5, she will share what the program has meant to her.
Nancy recalls that before she came to the Clubhouse in 1998 on Girls’ Day, her access to computers was limited to church and library and then mainly for typing. “The only thing I really knew how to do was disable a computer!” she jokes. But her Girls’ Day experience at age 12 motivated her to spend two or three afternoons a week at the Clubhouse. Mastering sophisticated graphic design and video editing programs like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere at 15, she shot a video on drugs for a health class and made a Web page with Dreamweaver. Clubhouse staff and mentors “really helped me when I needed it,” but they always asked her “to try to do it myself first.”
A mentor herself, she enjoys “passing what I learned on to new members.” In addition, through the Clubhouse, Nancy landed a job at the Museum of Science’s Cahners ComputerPlace, where she introduced visitors to new computer software programs. She now works as a Clubhouse assistant on Girls’ Day. Multi-faceted, Douyon also plays bass clarinet, clarinet, and saxophone in a jazz band, speaks Haitian-Creole and a little French.
She believes that the most valuable thing she’s learned at the Clubhouse is “to create myself. I had an image of myself. The Clubhouse really showed me what I was capable of doing and helped me get started.” A senior at Roxbury’s John D. O’Bryant School taking college prep courses, including pre-calculus and Advanced Placement physics, Douyon has her sights set on college, majoring in engineering, and “being successful at whatever I do, but not forgetting those who helped me get where I am.”