From Seed to Full Bloom: Joy's Journey of Healing and Service
She learned silence long before she found the words. Her voice came back to her in community — and it has been rising ever since.
Minnesota
In the house where Joy grew up, the television went dark the instant anything tender or difficult crossed the screen — a body, a word, a subject that belonged behind closed doors. No one ever explained the rule, and no one needed to. She absorbed it the way children absorb everything: completely, without question. Some things, you simply did not speak of.
She was a girl on steady ground. A family that loved each other easily, a safe and privileged corner of Minnesota, a childhood almost entirely untouched by hardship. She had never once had to search for her own footing, because the ground had always held.
And then, in her senior year of high school, that ground gave way. She was raped.
What came after is harder to describe than the thing itself. There were no words for it — none that could name what had happened and let her set it down. Her thoughts turned to fog; the world seemed to reach her from a long way off, muffled, as though through water. For the first time in her life she felt entirely lost — unmoored from the girl she had been, with no map to whoever she was now. And beneath it all ran a quiet, constant ache she could not have explained to anyone, even if she had known how.
But she had learned, long ago, in a house where the screen went dark. So she carried it alone.
She threw herself into research, trying to understand her own mind, and just as often tried to convince herself that nothing had happened at all — reaching to understand, then pushing it all away, back and forth, for years. What she knew, underneath the noise, was that she was starving for something to move toward. A purpose. Anything that might give the days a shape again.
She was studying nonprofit work and entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota, but the coursework wouldn't take hold — not sitting in a lecture hall, not with so much still moving beneath the surface. She had already come to understand something about the way she learns.
"In order for me to actually learn this, I needed to put it into practice," she says. "I can't just talk about it in theory and somehow retain it."
So when she heard that a small nonprofit in Peru was working to build a shelter for women fleeing violence, she found her way there — coordinating the trip as an independent study, so the classroom might come with her. She had no idea she was walking toward her own healing.
June 2009 | Chimbote, Peru
At the time, Peru carried one of the highest reported rates of domestic violence in the world.
Chimbote is a quiet coastal city, the desert gathering at its edges, where in those years perhaps eighty percent of people had no work at all — and the women least of all. It was there that Joy met Anita: a social worker who seemed to know every family on her street, and precisely what was missing from their lives. There was nowhere for a woman in danger to go. The nearest shelter was an eight-hour bus ride away, in a city she'd never have seen — and no mother was going to leave her children and disappear onto that bus. So there was, in truth, nowhere at all.
Joy decided they would build one.
She raised the money the only way she knew how: making and selling jewelry, a small craft she had quietly run as her own since she was fifteen. And over the summers that followed, she helped raise the shelter with her own hands, beside Anita.
She stayed on as Anita's shadow. Each morning a line formed outside the door — some days a hundred people deep — waiting for food assistance, for aid, for anything at all. Joy would sit at a table in a plastic chair on a dirt floor and take the intake interviews, one woman after another, close to a thousand of them in time. Mostly, she listened. And what she heard undid every assumption she had carried in with her. These women were not asking to be rescued. Almost every one of them, before anything else, asked the very same thing:
"Do you know anywhere I can get a job?"
They were ready to work. There was simply no work to be had.
And here is what Joy had still not done, in all of it: she had never once spoken her own truth aloud. Not to a counselor, not to her family, not to a single soul. It broke loose from her, in the end, in the most ordinary room imaginable. She was on a volunteer trip, seated in a circle of forty strangers, each person naming something they struggled with — divorced parents, a failing class, the small and human weights we all carry. She could feel her turn moving toward her around the circle, and her heart began to pound, because she still had no idea what she would say. She had buried it so long, so deep. And then the turn reached her.
And then she began to sob.
"It just came out of me," she says.
Those strangers are, to this day, among the closest friends she has in the world — because for the first time, someone had seen the whole of her, and stayed.
That was the beginning of the truth that would organize the rest of her life, and she saw it confirmed everywhere she turned in Peru: in the circles of women she worked beside, women who had endured more than she could have imagined, and who passed their stories one to the next without flinching, without shame.
"The antidote to trauma," she says, "is community. So much of our healing takes place there — whether or not we ever recognize it."
She loved those women fiercely. Warrior women, she calls them. And chief among them, always, is Anita — still her partner in the work, all these years and some twenty-two trips later, and something very close to her Peruvian mother. To know Anita, Joy will tell you, is to hold two truths at once. "She's literally one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life," she says. "And also — she's just laughing it up, living her best life on that dance floor." A small package and a big party, Joy calls her: a woman who never touches a drop and is somehow always the last one still dancing.
"I think women who've persevered through really hard things," Joy says, "find more reasons to celebrate the small ones."
The brilliance and the dance floor, held in the very same hands. That was the duality Joy fell in love with — and the one she has been building around ever since.
Because out of all of it came Fair Anita, the company Joy founded in 2015 and named for the woman who had shown her what was possible.
Its purpose was simple, and quietly radical: to build economic self-sufficiency for women. She had learned exactly why it mattered in shelter after shelter, story after story.
"Financial insecurity is the number one reason women stay in abusive partnerships."
Give a woman her own earnings, her own purse strings, and you change far more than her circumstances. You change a whole community — because when a woman earns, nearly all of it flows back to the people around her.
At first she tried to build the business around the work the Chimbote women already did, braiding estera — a reed rope woven into the mats and chairs and even the walls of desert homes. They braided from morning until night and were paid mere pennies for a week of it, and Joy wanted, more than anything, to place a fairer value on their hands. When she couldn't quite make that work, she returned to what she knew best, and Fair Anita grew into jewelry — designed not for these women but with them, in the language of craft she had spoken since girlhood. The work widened from there, to India and beyond, and everywhere she went the same discovery was waiting: women of extraordinary talent who did not need saving. "I make this," they would tell her. "Can you sell it for me?" It took her a while, she admits, to truly hear it — until enough women had said it that something finally gave. "Joy," she remembers thinking, "how about you just listen?" And she did. Today, Fair Anita works with around eight thousand women, across nineteen cooperatives, in nine countries — held together by a team you could count on two hands. She has never quite stopped marveling at it. "This is my 'get to,'" she says. "I get to work with these incredibly talented women, design products, build something that actually works for me. How cool is that?"
Today
Some words have stayed with Joy ever since Peru. "There's a quote that's literally hanging right inside the organization where I met Anita," she says, "and the fact that it had my name in it… it felt like it spoke to me."
"I slept and I dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and I saw that life is service. I served, and I saw that service is joy."
Her own name, written into a truth she was only beginning to live.
The girl who once had no words is now a woman surrounded by them — carrying the stories of thousands of women who trusted her with theirs. The family she was once so frightened to tell now stands fully beside her.
Her own mother has become Fair Anita's most devoted volunteer, sitting with artisan partners in Cambodia and Peru, with Vietnam still ahead of her. And Anita, after all these years, has just been handed her very first passport — so that she might at last make the journey north, and be celebrated on this side of the world, too.
On the hard days, Joy still returns to the words she taught herself to say — the ones she would offer, without hesitation, to any woman standing where she once stood:
"You are safe. You are loved. You'll get through this."
And if that woman asked how to begin finding her way back, Joy's answer would be simpler still. "Find community," she'd tell her. "Resilience is a lot easier in community." She only wishes she'd believed it sooner — that she'd let herself be seen years before she finally did. "I could have saved a lot of it," she says. "I feel way more seen now."
No one, it turns out, was ever meant to carry it alone.
When I first heard Joy's story, I felt it in my body before I had a single word for it — a tightness in my chest, the helplessness a young girl must have felt when something was taken from her that was never anyone's to take. I'll be honest: this is tender ground for me, and I sat with the weight of it a long while.
But Joy doesn't leave you there. She takes the hardest thing a life can hold and turns it into a fulcrum — proof that pain, met honestly, can lift into being something far more beautiful than what came before.
I keep picturing a seed buried deep in the dark, its small voice hushed — and how, in its own quiet time, it rises into full bloom. Not beauty for itself alone, but color and fragrance spilling over everything around it. That is Joy. And that is what her story leaves in me: that no matter how hard the season, I can turn inward and find a way to make something beautiful of it — for myself, and for everyone within reach.
This print is my dedication to her — all blossom and color and fragrance — for the way she is changing the story for women like herself, and for the many who carry the same one.
To step further into Joy's world: visit Fair Anita, the company she named for Anita — or watch her TEDx talk, "How Women Rise."
Joy