Meet BeadforLife Volunteer – Joanne Jacoby

I am from Los Angeles, California. I grew up in California, went to Berkeley in the 60s, and was a full-fledged hippie. I love to travel and have been blessed to see a lot of the world, including recently living and working in Madurai, India and Kisumu, Africa. I worked in both places as a psychotherapist training the staffs to work with people who have experienced trauma. What brings me the most joy is meeting people from other cultures, particularly people in third world countries, and working with them to help improve their lives. I receive 100-fold in love, joy, and fulfillment what I give to them.

I also enjoy photographing people. I use the camera as a way to connect and as a lens into people’s lives and souls. Some day I would like to travel the world meeting and photographing people, chronicling a slice of their life, and then putting everything together in a book.

I began volunteering at BeadforLife at its inception. A close friend of mine is a very close friend with BeadforLife

co-founder Ginny Jordan. She told me about BeadForLife and I was intrigued with the concept and wanted to help. So I began volunteering when the volunteer room that held all the beads was a closet.  “You’ve come a long way baby” is certainly a phrase that belongs to BeadForLife, as well as an example of what three people can set into motion.

I went to Uganda with Devin’s husband Mark and that trip really did change my life. It began my knowing that I wanted to work in another country using my skills and talents to help others and then I acted on that dream.

At the present time, I am involved with the “pad project,” raising money for reusable sanitary pads for girls in Kenya. While I was in Kenya, I discovered that girls were dropping out of school as soon as they began menstruating because they had no sanitary pads. They were too poor to have rags (these were their clothes) or to use mattress stuffing (they slept on the ground); some of the girls used cow dung to catch their menstrual blood and got terrible infections, so they stopped going to school. This meant that they no longer got breakfast nor lunch, two meals they received at school. Soon they were working as sex workers, became pregnant and/or became HIV positive or got AIDS.  K-MET , the organization through which I’m working has begun a project making reusable sanitary pads. Six pads last the girls six months and costs $6. So, for $12 a girl can stay in school for one year. I hope to be able to establish a nonprofit to continue to raise money for pads, but on a larger scale.

Tags: BeadCircle, BeadforLife, Boulder, Empowering Women, paper jewelry, Poverty Eradication, Women Making A Difference