Meet Joy Ellsworth- a Social Entrepreneur & Founder at Clement Waters, a non-profit organization that helps people to become better stewards of gifts that are naturally available to all of humanity.
Joy had always catalyzed the expression of harmony and achievement between other people. As a result, she first found an organization called ‘My Heart Song’ following her husband’s dramatic and unmedicated health turnaround, caused by an unplanned lifestyle change that relied upon nature. This led her to help other people find inexpensive, nature-reliant ways to improve their health and wellness. She believes that part of relying upon nature is relying on humanity’s natural strength: our ability to flourish in a community. If we rely upon nature for good health and well-being, we must respect and protect the natural world’s ability to take care of us.
According to her, her family’s life before the founding of Clement Waters was very urban corporate. They would seek good health from sustainable products and holistic activities, but the influence of modern society (convenient processed foods, sedentary indoor hours, stress) delayed their overall healing. “Our breakthrough happened when we found ourselves regularly learning from nature by constantly being out in the open with people who relied upon nature to survive,” she says.
Clement Waters Retreat encourages a change in mindset from artificial to natural. It spreads information about natural solutions, holds events celebrating nature’s gifts to humanity, and develops nature spaces that harbor honorable nature connections. Achieving good health and wellness through natural means can be a difficult adjustment for people who are used to living in modern society, but certain people, especially those who have been victims of abuse or trauma, crave these therapeutic nature connections. Today, over 500 volunteers have shown up to perform physical labour at their urban forest restoration events in the past two years (before the COVID-19 pandemic). For Ellsworth, word of mouth is still their greatest evangelist, even though they’ve appeared on podcasts, radio shows and even a documentary about the river that runs nearby their first forest restoration project.
As lots of people perpetually ask her team to help them to rely upon nature more often, it makes for a very busy schedule for her. If anyone was to meet her before the pivotal health experience that she had gone through, she could never have predicted that 8 years later, she and her husband would be choosing to live in a small apartment with their two young children, just because it places their family’s focus more on the outside and reduces the distracting modern costs of living. From starting out as suburbanite homeowners to the owners of a big organisation, their life now is in service to the world. They believe that the natural world is monumentally huge and complex, and everyone is a monumental part of it naturally. All that is required now is to come outside and find one’s true nature.
Talking about the challenges of being a working woman, she says, “As an ambitious woman, I have frequently felt the pressure of being targeted and penalized by men in power who doubt their own legitimacy. Now, this may also happen between men in the professional world, but with many women, attempts to subdue ambition can cross unacceptable physical boundaries. I survived a life-threatening sexual assault just as I was starting out, at age 19. The psychological ramifications of that experience taught me about how post-traumatic stress can shape the mind and body in ways that are difficult to overcome. The path of entrepreneurship was for me a path of greater control of my work environment, but it comes with its own challenges. For an entrepreneur, the success of your organization is heavily dependent upon you.”