By Stan Friedman
CHICAGO (December 23, 2005) – Joyce Nelson says she always was a bit rebellious and a challenge for her parents.
“We were a raucous bunch of kids,” says Nelson. “Three of the four of us fit the stereotype of pastor’s kids.”
The president and CEO of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Nelson says she now has more respect for her parents, Margaret and the late Wesley Nelson, a well-known Covenant pastor and former North Park Theological Seminary professor. (To read Joyce’s reflections during a memorial service to her father in January 2003, please see Wesley Nelson.)
The president and CEO of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Nelson says she now has more respect for her parents, Margaret and the late Wesley Nelson, a well-known Covenant pastor and former North Park Theological Seminary professor. (To read Joyce’s reflections during a memorial service to her father in January 2003, please see Wesley Nelson.)
“My appreciation and connection with my folks and the admiration continue to grow,” Nelson says. “They, for me, really modeled a calling, and you don’t find that much anymore, where people feel called to a certain work.”
Called is exactly what Nelson feels in her job. “When you’re called, you don’t worry about the hours you put in. I don’t think I realized at the time how much of an influence they were on me.”
Nelson was elected by the Board of Directors in December 2004 and became president in January after having spent 21 years working her way up through the organization. Though she had been the national director of field operations for five years preceding her election, she says she is surprised by the demands of the job.
Once thinking she knew almost all there was to know about the job, Nelson says, “I’m learning I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.” She adds, “What I didn’t know is how much I would love this work.”
The work this past year has meant earning a lot of air miles as she travels from her home in Denver to numerous locations in the country. Not only is she learning more about the job, she is gaining a better understanding of her father’s work.
“There’s quite a lot of speaking in my job,” Nelson says. “That’s why I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for my dad. And he had to come up with something different every week. At least I can use the same speech.”
When Nelson graduated from North Park University in the early 1970s, she never imagined herself leading a large nonprofit organization. Having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and secondary education, the newly graduated student discovered she didn’t care much for the classroom.
She began looking to work for a nonprofit agency when she learned the Multiple Sclerosis Society chapter in the San Francisco Bay area was looking for someone to coordinate its read-a-thon, in which children secured monetary contribution pledges for the books they read. She began recruiting teachers and schools and got her first taste of fundraising.
Two years later she became the executive director of the office in Kansas City, Kansas. “When I first started, it was just a job. After a year or two, I saw that it could really be a career,” Nelson says.
“I got to get involved in community development, building coalitions, advocacy,” Nelson recalls. “Now I get to spark the challenge in others. That’s why I’m enjoying the job so much.”
Nelson’s drive and desire to help others is quickly apparent when speaking with her. They have been a major part of her life, even as a teenager, when her father’s involvement in the civil rights movement influenced her.
She relates one story of being a high school senior in 1968 and deciding she wanted to know what it was like to be a minority. To gain a better understanding, she transferred in the spring to an all-black school on the south side of Chicago. During the final weeks there, Martin Luther King was shot and when she arrived at school, she learned it had been closed due to rioting. Her friends got her out safely, however, so that she could catch a bus back home.
She wrote an article about the experience called “Blue Eyes” that appeared in The Covenant Companion. As a result, she and the magazine each won the 1969 Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
During her years at North Park University, she traveled as part of a folk gospel team and became the school’s first female student body president in 1971-1972. She worked for years at Camp Squanto, part of the Pilgrim Pines Conference Center in West Swanzey, New Hampshire.
She also worked as a youth minister at North Park Covenant Church in Chicago. “What I always will treasure about that (experience) was that my dad was the interim pastor at the same time,” she says. “That was a real special opportunity for me.”
Today, Nelson says is experiencing another kind of special opportunity. “When you get into this kind of work, you are blessed and very fortunate about the kind of work that you are doing.”
(Editor’s note: to learn more about MS, please see Multiple Sclerosis.)
Copyright © 2011 The Evangelical Covenant Church.