Joanne Hickox said she founded the nonprofit organization Seniors on a Mission in 1999 with principles that guided her then and still do today.
“I exist to honor, love and encourage older adults, inspiring them to live invigorated lives filled with purpose and grace,” she said.
“That is literally my superpower: Honoring, loving and encouraging older adults.”
Twenty-six years later, those words remain in the mission statement of the organization, a ministry that takes seniors living at home on daylong service trips to local nonprofits to perform volunteer work.
Among Hickox’s advancements, she launched free technology pop-up trainings to help seniors learn to use their mobile devices and created the vision for G3Village, a proposed self-sustaining rental community aimed at addressing the senior housing crisis.
“They say that necessity is the mother of innovation. At Seniors on a Mission, we’ve been innovative in so many different ways because of the needs of our senior adults,” she said.
One reason for the organization’s longevity is that it has kept its focus directly on the people it serves, Hickox said.
“A risk that I took and have been taking for 20 years is I have never drifted from our mission,” she said. “We work with older adults, and that’s what we do. Even when there wasn’t funding for it, even when it was unpopular, we’ve never drifted from our mission.”
As she looks at the years ahead for the organization, she says she has no difficulty finding inspiration. All she has to do is look around.
“Honestly, I find inspiration everywhere,” she said. “When I was a young girl, people would always say, ‘Oh my gosh, that woman gets high on oxygen.’ And it’s the truth: I find beauty in everything.
“My greatest inspiration obviously comes from my relationship with the Lord, but the Lord can be found in so many things.”