Rising Stars: Meet Verane Jackie Deschamps of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Verane Jackie Deschamps

Hi Verane Jackie , please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
When I look back on my life, I am amazed at how so many good things have come into place for my son and me. Several years ago I was very active in my Los Angeles Rampart community where I resided, working night shifts with the Red Cross as a caseworker for Armed Forces Emergency Services and Community Emergency Services. I adopted my son who had been my neighbor and was in and out of Foster Homes.

I thought of him as a little genius who had learned to read in our reading circles and who was always caring for all the other little kids around him. I thought that surely I can’t help all the kids but if I help this kid who helps other kids, my time and effort can make a real positive difference. So my life went from service to pure love after being asked to adopt him at one of his courts’ moments. My life changed the day I became his mom.

My kid had skipped a few grades while I was mentoring him daily after our reading circles but then was held back again due to his constant life changes family after family before he was in my care. When I found out he was goofing around and not doing well, I panicked fearing that I may lose him from our poor school performance. My ex had said “He goofs to seek attention, he is a performer, put him in front of the camera.” Best thing my ex ever said!

I found out how to place my son on movie sets in front of the camera and made a deal with him: “I learned how to place you on a tv show, if you like it and want it, catch up the entire semester that we are flunking over the xmas holidays and I will dedicate myself to helping you continue.” It worked! The kid did not mind the eight hours of focus and work in front of the camera, interlaced with school work and the extra 4 hours of multiple buses to go and come back from the studio, because we had no car at the time. He loved it! He became one of the two best students of his school in the next semester. I had to keep my word too. I volunteered for several talent agencies, learned to build our own talent agency MMPR GROUP to access the auditions system and give him the spotlight. Soon we parlayed our success into helping other actors by representing them alongside my son. To pay it forward we started Active Actors as a 501c3 non-profit organization to help actors help each other and to elevate, educate, and advocate within the community. My son’s Rabbi agreed to be Active Actors CEO until my son became the CEO. We rented space from the Temple and offered acting classes on camera and improvisation techniques, mixed with wellbeing, stress management, and peer-mentoring.

We organized volunteers to serve every Friday for over 15years at the Hollywood Las Palmas Senior Center to encourage intergenerational acting and all ages inter-mentoring. Many seniors were rejuvenated with successful auditions and work on SAG-AFTRA sets. Younger people were asked to volunteer and work with the elderly and in exchange received free classes. We served at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles offering Veterans the knowledge of how to audition and work on film sets for Action Movies with the special skills that they acquired through their service.
We served at the Hollywood Youth Center working for free for the community’s families, helping families stay together by working on a craft together. When the Youth Center started asking us a hefty rent due to our high attendance tho we were all volunteering, we moved to a Hollywood park and stayed there every Saturday for several years.

Active Actors has been serving the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office with its Mayor’s Crisis Response Team for over a decade now, mobilizing actors several times per year to help enact crises and train the city volunteers who intervene when LAPD and LAFD require assistance from a Crisis Response Team (CRT).

My son meanwhile has become a star with a Paramount movie, Lifetime movie, among other roles. Also, he has become a father. My grandson, just like my son, participated in all our meetings and activities as a way of raising him and working at the same time. Active Actors moved to Zoom sessions during the pandemic as most Casting did. We created film festivals during the pandemic while the world was in suspense out of love of one another to bridge and serve our native and adopted cultures as well as continue to be active and communicate with the Arts and the Artists, and with Producers and Directors.

Today we proudly pursue the endeavor of bringing people together and serving our community, our country and our world at large through acting and filmmaking. We believe actors are ambassadors as they are influencers. We are using the very prestigious social clubs of The Aster in Hollywood and the Los Angeles Athletics Club in Downtown LA as our base to gather and bring people together. We are extending our film festivals reach which started with the FRANCE USA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL and AFRICA USA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL soon to be followed up with LATINO USA and ASIA USA. Our film festivals engage us proudly in working with all countries and their leaderships through their consulates, embassies, chambers of commerce and industry and other programs, independent or governmental.

We approach our work with love and passion. While we are grass-root, volunteer based, still word of mouth for the most part, we are learning to make more and more alliances to keep in the service of our great City of Angels and our great country of the United States of America, a beacon of light and liberty and love and fraternity and democracy in the world and imagination of all people.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s never a smooth road. While challenges often turn into opportunities, it’s sometimes hard to remember that in the midst of it all, until an end can become a new beginning. Many times along the road for MMPR Group or Active Actors, while our programs were shining and thriving with influence and or success, struggles came out of nowhere, hard hitting and sleep depriving, stressing us when we should have been able to rejoice. But, as they say, what does not kill us makes us stronger. Many stories illustrate this down through the years. I would say everything we ever did was accompanied with struggles to the point where sometimes if it had not been a family affair as a beacon, it could have been easy to be discouraged and to give up. But giving up was never an option as it had become our way of life and reason for being.

For example, most recently, the Africa USA International Film Festival which we started in the time of the Black Lives Matter when we wanted to do something in addition to marching the streets to demonstrate and advocate our love, fraternity and equality.

Soon after being created and accepted by Film Freeway, the platform with Film Festivals, AFRICA USA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL was shut down for a reason we could not understand.
I lined up all 55 countries of the continent of Africa from the internet and started emailing their representing offices there and in the USA. Some responded and one started advising me, guiding me on how to communicate, what words to use (Consulates use the word MISSION:) One offered an alliance, and we were given an opportunity to have our first festival with the Africa USA International Chamber of Commerce and Industry, we changed a family vacation plan and flew to Atlanta to organize with them our first festival. And we collaborated with Film Freeway, made more alliances in the USA and in Africa learning after all the dimensions of our volunteer endeavor go way beyond BLM. Many tell me to leave the geopolitics aside and focus on the Arts, I believe the Arts give us an entre to learn to know every one and as we like to say “To know someone always means we end up loving that someone”.

I believe Film Festivals, as we learned to mix them with Immersive Arts, are a bridge for all Artists, Filmmakers and Fashionistas, providing opportunities to bring Music, Graphics, Painting, dancing, all art, into the effort to create a context where dancers, models, actors, government leaders and business leaders and all people can appreciate and communicate with one another.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I always say my day job is Talent Agency with MMPR Group and my hobby job is Active Actors. I specialize in Film — everything film, especially the placement of Actors. My hobby job calls me to be as creative and ambassadorial as I can learn to be. All my jobs call me to lead people and reach out to the other side to create opportunities for collaboration.

I am most proud when actors I work with turn into leads and leaders who then become my best partners in different capacities as teachers for other actors or team leaders when we volunteer in the community or for the film festivals; and filmmakers when we shoot our own productions with named actors in times of otherwise inactivity (such as SAG-AFTRA strikes or recently the long pandemic.
I am most proud when I get to work with my son and I see my son shine as he is my sunshine, and my grandson who, in the footsteps of his father, is reading at high school level when just in grade school and is developing on his own for his hobby and pleasure over 300k followers doing his fashion statements. I am so happy for both of them for the wonderful men they are.

If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Looking back, I see a most important ingredient to my success is claiming my power to overcome obstacles and to nurture that empowerment in others in return, as I encourage them, we encourage each other, to learn, change, and grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://MMPRGROUP.COM
• Instagram: @MMPRGROUP
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002964676107&mibextid=LQQJ4d VERANE JACKIE DESCHAMPS

Image Credits
@eresphotostudio
@vaasborgphoto
@emekecho (festival logos)