Founder
Jacqueline
Caruso
Jacqueline began her career in community service as a teenager. At fourteen, New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program placed her in an administrative role at Eger Healthcare, a medical and long-term care facility for older adults. It was a pivotal moment—one that revealed a love for data analysis, organizational compliance, and understanding the human impact of administrative processes.
Since then, she has worked as a teacher in France and New York City, and held roles across educational, cultural, and human-services institutions, supporting projects of every scale. Her passions are art, storytelling, peace, and justice—through her work she has shaped a unified mission that is both personal and professional.
In 2021, Bee University NYC became her first hands-on, holistic leadership experience—a grassroots youth beekeeping initiative she helped launch and later led as Executive Director, guiding its transition into an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. There she learned that fundraising is not a single function but an organization-wide strategy embedded in programs, partnerships, governance, and community trust.
An unshakable belief
in anything is a powerful
and beautiful feeling.
The spirit of Mon Amour NYC lives in a photograph of Jacqueline’s paternal grandmother Marie as a girl, playfully sticking her tongue out at the camera. Marie grew up in the Lower East Side in the 1930s. Her first job at thirteen was working at an automat restaurant—a signal of a New York City already moving so fast that working folks sought the convenience of coin-slot meals.
Marie’s story, and that of both the paternal and maternal ancestors’ immigration to the United States, emerges from a complex journey between New York City and Italy’s southernmost regions from the 1890s through the 1950s, until the families finally settled.
In photos from the 1930s and 40s, before she was married, Marie is always active: playing softball, fishing, or standing on an undeveloped Brooklyn shoreline in jeans and a work jacket, posing with a big, cheerful, liberated smile. Her civic engagement and the ways she carved out a place for herself to survive and thrive in this city are traits gratefully inherited.
Like her ancestors, Jacqueline has found herself living and working in the city she sometimes facetiously calls the “center of the universe”—not to praise its magnificence, but to explain the overwhelming feeling of being an ordinary resident of a global epicenter of business, politics, and culture.