Shared Ground

Episode 3: Safety blankets and showing up for others with Joy Gruver

• Sean Knierim & Allan Marks

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Today Allan and Sean talk with Joy Gruver about her response to the January fires in the LA region, and more broadly about responding when others are struggling.  

We weave between personal stories of giving and professional insights into textile sustainability.

On the personal side, what started as delivering a basic care package with her daughter evolved into something far more profound for Sean's family.  

Joy, who works in business development focusing on sustainability at Eastman Chemical in the fiber industry, brings a unique perspective to disaster response. She leveraged her professional connections with companies like Marmot (thank you, Kim!) to secure clothing donations for fire victims and shares insights into how these individual actions connected to larger community efforts. 

The conversation takes a remarkable turn when discussing how teenagers organized a sophisticated clothing redistribution system, methodically matching donations to specific family needs with an efficiency that impressed even seasoned professionals.

Throughout the conversation, resilience emerges as more than just surviving hardship—it's about community connections, preparedness, and finding meaning in difficulty. 

As Joy puts it, "Part of resilience is lifting yourself up from those dark days, being appreciative for what we actually have, and not being afraid to ask for what you need." Her story reminds us that in our most vulnerable moments, both giving and receiving support with grace can transform lives. How might you prepare yourself to be both a giver and receiver of support when your community faces challenges?

Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.

For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.

Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).

Sean Knierim:

This is Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community. I'm Alan Marks

Sean Knierim:

And I'm Sean Knierim. Today we have yet another person we really respect an d like. Joy Gruver is joining us. .

Joy Gruver:

This is a loaded question, god. I feel like I'm a lot of things right. I think as a working mom like you're pulled in a lot of directions, so depending on where I'm at is kind of who I am at th moment.

Sean Knierim:

Who do you want to be right now?

Joy Gruver:

I want to be interesting, right, I want to.

Sean Knierim:

That's our hope as well.

Joy Gruver:

Right, that's the goal is telling, I guess, yet another part of my story and my life and how it relates back to you and your life. So, yeah, I want to share stories. I guess I'm a communicator by nature, so the fact of communicating in a platform like this is exciting and interesting and different than what I do in my normal world.

Sean Knierim:

C an you give us just a quick view of what's the normal world look like, and then we'll jump into stories.

Joy Gruver:

Sure, so I'm a mom of two teenagers, a working mom. I do business development for a chemical company focused on sustainability. I work in the fibers area for our business. So I work with a lot of brands on the West Coast helping to pull through from our technology into their supply chains, and it's a pretty dynamic role. But I've been doing it for a while and it's fun, keeps me going, makes me wake up every morning.

Sean Knierim:

Great. Well, we're glad you chose to spend part of the day here with us. So, as a lot of these episodes are starting as we're getting this podcast going, we're looking back at the fires and what happened in Los Angeles in early January and something we're asking each person we're talking to is like, as you think back to the 7th to the 8th of January, can you walk us through what you remember? What were you feeling? What was life feeling like for you, for your family, back in early January?

Joy Gruver:

Yeah. So for me I'm going to relate it back to your family, because when I heard about the fires that they were in the Palisades, the first thing I thought of was your daughter. Having met your beautiful daughter last November doing the school-wide clothing swap and sharing the sustainability story to all the students that came to our event that day, I got to talking to some of these students and what went through my mind as I saw and heard about the fires is like I hope these kids are okay, you know, and they were beautiful kids and full of like questions about sustainability and wanting to know what I do, and they were just very inquisitive kids and all I can think about was they could potentially be losing everything that they have.

Sean Knierim:

And to paint a picture on that, this wasn't just Joy showing up at a high school and talking to a handful of kids. You and Maria, my daughter, put together a full-on panel with four other badass professional women that Maria was moderating, but you and Maria put on a full clothing swap in the afternoon to start thinking about sustainability, which is going to come back into this story the amount of stuff that was lost, but also the amount of stuff that showed back up. Yeah, so you had a deep connection with my kid and with all of these others. So back to the fires are happening and you start thinking about this community.

Joy Gruver:

So I think about the community, I think about your daughter and you. But so I sent Maria a message and I said you know, are you guys okay? If you need a place to stay? You know I'm in the South Bay, come stay with me. I have a pullout couch, like whatever you guys need. And she wrote that you know you guys had it handled and you were in a hotel and it hurt me for you guys going through that.

Joy Gruver:

And so I think, with tragedy sometimes like it can also bring beauty and so showing the community how like you can show up. I mean I live 25 miles south of you but I could see the Palisades burning from my house. I have a line direct to the Palisades from my hillside and it was just unbelievable. So I think that me just reaching out to Maria, and I think you guys were still like in shock of like everything happening, so she couldn't quite get back to me on what her needs were. But I gave it a couple of days and decided, like with my daughter, like let's go shopping, let's build a kit for Maria and let's see what we can donate and help. And so at that point my daughter was like, yeah, let's go shopping. So we went to Target, got a bunch of things, and actually I even want to take this back a couple of steps, because when the fires were happening, we, even 25 miles south in the South Bay, were getting alerts on our phones right.

Joy Gruver:

And all I can think about is like how is a fire possibly going to be happening here? But then you hear about these terrible arsonists, right, and so I'm thinking all the fire department is on the other side of the city, like if they're just bad people, they will, like, put PV on fire in the South Bay. So I was thinking when I got these alerts, like, oh my gosh, this is what's happening. There could potentially be arsonists. So I started throwing stuff in my car just to be prepared, and I threw a couple of blankets in the car right, the blanket's part of the story. And then that weekend, when my daughter and I went shopping at Target, we got a bunch of stuff and, by the way, there was no fires in my area.

Sean Knierim:

The South Bay was safe.

Joy Gruver:

The South Bay was safe, yes, but that weekend we found out where you guys were and so we drove to where you were and I wanted my daughter to just be a part of this. A I wanted her to meet your daughter, because your daughter is a pretty amazing young woman, and then, b, I want her to feel how important it is to help community, and I think it's really important to help our teenagers. You know, teenagers can be kind of selfish, which we all were selfish, right as teenagers. That's kind of part of it. Some older people are.

Allan Marks:

Many of us still are. I don't think they have a monopoly on being selfish.

Joy Gruver:

Right, right, right. That's very true, very true In fact in the country.

Allan Marks:

In many ways, I think that one of the things I've seen I've seen it also not just in the fire response selfishness in many ways that I'm seeing in her cohort than I think I remember seeing in in my generation when we were younger that's awesome.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, that's awesome and certainly, I think, less selfishness I see in people my age today well, see, I feel like this next generation, they're just they're gonna be kick-ass, right, they're gonna. I already are, I, they, they already are in so many ways. In some ways, they're just they're going to be kick-ass right, they're going to, they already are.

Allan Marks:

They already are in so many ways and in some ways because they're able to assimilate things from so many different ways. So I'm just you know, I'm listening to you talk about the story of your experience, what happened with the fire. I'm also thinking behind it, before that, when you were at the high school, and the way that you were bringing in your experience with this and chemicals and fabrics and synthetics versus natural fibers and dyes, and how does all that play into a supply chain? You're talking to kids that kind of get it, because they're actually attuned to all those different things. They're consumers, maybe more than they are producers, but they care about environmental impacts, they care about labor and the integrity of supply chains and making sure that their stuff if it's really cheap which well, it's nice, but why is it cheap? And my daughter will sometimes say, if it's too cheap, don't buy it because that means it's slave labor and whether that's right or not, there is this awareness of the different strands that they're able to synthesize and pull together.

Joy Gruver:

What I loved about that day, too, is we had over a hundred students in that auditorium. I'll go to events, speaking events and with adults there'll be no questions in the audience. Interesting, that day there were so many questions in the audience and in fact we were taking it beyond the bell. The bell rang and we're still talking and they're coming up to me afterwards asking questions and so, like adults don't do that, this is fantastic that these kids are doing this, yeah.

Allan Marks:

Real learners.

Allan Marks:

I think one of the advantages perhaps of the access that we have now to so much information so quickly just on our phones or whatever, is it allows the license for unbridled curiosity, yeah, and there's a connection in this generation to what they want to do with their time and their life and their resources, like, not only the consumer piece, but where are we going to work in the world and how are we going to insist that these jobs are going to be treating us or we're going to be doing? Yeah, and what's interesting here? So, as we think back to you and your daughter your own young daughter coming over to find us in one of our many Airbnbs this actually is a bridge between the two of you that you guys might not know. So you come over, joy, and you have the care package, which was spectacular. You brought these blankets and we'll put a picture on the website of my wife taking one of these blankets and it became her security blanket. Last night she was still wrapped in this blanket. This became a security blanket. It's the right image here. It became really important to her and we have this beautiful picture of the two of you hugging each other at a dinner.

Allan Marks:

But you also brought a box from one of your brand partnership Like. So you had been reached out to by one of the groups you work with and they were trying to figure out how to funnel contributions in and you asked like, how can we do this? Can I do it through Maria? So can you talk a bit about that? What you were hearing from that brand, yeah, and then I'll be able to extend this into. I mean I'm wearing. This was the first t-shirt I got. That wasn't one of the two that were in my go bag, so I'm wearing that proudly today as a Marmot fan, but these things funneled through my kid because of you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, no, that's true, I forgot about the box. So because Boxes Okay.

Joy Gruver:

So I have been in the textile apparel industry for a while I've been doing it for like 28 years and so I have a lot of great contacts. And so I also, after talking to your daughter, was like let me reach out to all these brands and see if I can get contributions. Let's get donations right. And so I reached out to a lot of these outdoor brands I don't know that I can say their names, but and reached out to some fashion brands, and a lot of them actually were doing their own thing to help the people of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. But Marmot stepped up and they sent me a couple of boxes to start with. And then my contact there was like, her name is Kim, by the way.

Sean Knierim:

Thank you, Kim.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, she's amazing. I saw her last week and she makes my heart happy. So Kim just got on it. This woman, by the way, she was like in jury duty for like a month and she still managed to take time to get these boxes out and deliver down to me. So like they're just amazing. So kudos to Marmot. And then, yeah, I was able to bring those boxes over to you and I think I just thought I was like helping, but I didn't. I guess I didn't really understand how deeply I was helping and how much that meant to you. And like you showing me the jacket, and your son was showing me the jacket that he was wearing.

Sean Knierim:

My son didn't bring a jacket out of the house and there's a few stories of jackets that appeared in his life. But then we have this huge box of Marmot gear. We all are like I had a t-shirt, aiden got a jacket. I think Maria grabbed something that fit her Nothing. My wife, like I had a t-shirt, aiden got a jacket. I think Maria grabbed something that fit her Nothing. My wife didn't see anything she wanted. So we had all of these amazing items.

Allan Marks:

And so, just to be clear, for those who haven't heard prior episodes of the podcast is after your family lost your home and all the clothes and things that you had before were lost.

Allan Marks:

So at this point I had a go bag, I had a small soccer club satchel, and that's the only clothes I had, and each of the rest Maria did a better job accumulating stuff, because she's better at everything than most of us. So we have this box and each of us got something. I mean, this was the first clean shirt I had in four days, which was pretty nice for lots of people around us, nice for everybody and Alan, I'm going to throw this over to you to tell this story because you were there, I only watched it.

Allan Marks:

So Maria has this stuff and she's trying to figure out what to do because she's stuck in this small apartment. School's not going on. She wants to do things instead of sitting around with her parents who are going crazy. So she and her friends start a clothing exchange. One of the very first, the first weekend after the fires, maria and her friends put together a social media campaign to let people know to come to her friend's house. The mom did not know until people started showing up that this was happening in her house and the marmot clothes and other clothes that you brought that we weren't able to use, plus donations from all over start flowing in and these girls and a couple of boys but it was mainly young women start giving this away to people in the community coming in that needed help I would say more than give it away.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I was impressed by the coordination.

Allan Marks:

My daughter and I went over, which I didn't know you were coming. You heard about this, so alan and his daughter show up to to volunteer and support maria and it's, and it wasn't really after the fires, it was sort of still during them in a way.

Speaker 3:

This is the the Saturday, so the bulk of the fire near the Palisades was done, the house where you held this in.

Allan Marks:

We were still under evacuation. We were still under evacuation. We were in Santa Monica.

Speaker 3:

And there was still embers coming down. In fact, one of the things we were doing was trying to when we had donated clothes or donated luggage which some people had brought because families need that too, you know, duffel bags and so forth was trying to move that and keep it clean because the embers kept getting on top of it Of course no one wants a bunch of you know, ashy clothes, especially when they're new, and a lot of people donated new things.

Speaker 3:

It wasn't just cleaning out their closets. That was appreciated, but what was impressive to me was the way the teenagers that were organizing it many from Pali High, many who had lost their own homes were focused on thinking what do other people need? What are the families we're giving this to actually need? So let's find out. And they're connecting on their phones with everybody and saying, well, look, so we have this family.

Speaker 3:

He has a father, he's an XXL, he needs, like, really big stuff and he likes baggy clothes. They've got two kids. You know the mom needs this and she's this size. You know, do we have any shoes that will fit that? People have donated a lot of shoes, especially women's shoes, athletic shoes and getting things that would fit the sizes and personalities to the extent they knew them of the specific families that were receiving the donations. And at the very end we had absolutely so much clothing and some of us then drove over to Goodwill to donate the rest of it because there was only so much you could do after this, because a lot of the families that had reached out and said they were in need had already communicated that, but the donations were still coming in. That was entirely organized by teenagers who kind of rose to the occasion, yeah, and really, in a very effective and efficient way, helped a lot of families.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, that's amazing, I didn't know that.

Allan Marks:

And they got out in front of what then became an outpouring, just a really amazing outpouring of generosity and stuff that starts showing up across the region, where stores were giving things away and people were giving things away and gyms were filling up with clothing for like the 26 families at the gym that my family belongs to lost homes, and it was amazing and Joy. I'm interested, if you could, from your perspective as a professional working on sustainability in fashion, to see how the brands, to see how the community showed up for each other to share, and then also there's a lot of stuff right. So, as you were looking this through your eyes as a citizen, as a neighbor, but then also as a professional, what are your takeaways or memories of seeing all these things showing up?

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, it's funny. So I actually talked to a company called Homeboy Threads too. I reached out to them because-.

Allan Marks:

Amazing organization in downtown Los Angeles.

Joy Gruver:

They're awesome, so awesome. So they are a company, an organization that gives work to people that were formerly incarcerated, teaches them how to get back on their feet. So they have a Homeboy Electronics and they have Homeboy Threads.

Allan Marks:

And Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Cafe. It's really something worth checking out if you're not familiar with them.

Joy Gruver:

I saw it in LAX, the Homeboy Cafe. I bought some food from there. It was delicious. But I reached out to Homeboy because I was like they must have a bunch of garments too that they could donate. And so my friends there at Homeboy they were on it as well, communicating with people from the Palisades and the community and so, and then my concern too was, oh my God, they're going to have so much leftover right Stuff like which is great. That's a great problem to have. So I had asked Homeboy, like are you going to be able to take that? So they will. They ended up, I think, with a lot of the garments. I suggested to Maria, let's make that donation over to Homeboy, maybe they can help find another home for it. And so I know Homeboy was involved too in that whole process.

Speaker 3:

It's actually interesting you mentioned that, though, because in talking to people in disaster recovery not just in California, but I mean around the country from Hawaii to North Carolina Excess donated clothing is actually a problem.

Joy Gruver:

It is.

Speaker 3:

And where does it go and can it be efficiently reused or recycled or find a new home, and if not, what are the environmental consequences of that? That's actually been something that people have looked at. I don't know if you've.

Joy Gruver:

That's my world.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I don't know if you have any thoughts on ways that could be helped.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, I mean so. I work for Eastman. We're a company that is really focused on finding solutions for circularity, so we make material-to-material conversions, so being able to take mixed waste materials and convert it into something that you can use again.

Allan Marks:

What is mixed waste materials? Convert it into something that you can use again. What is mixed waste materials? Yeah, yeah For example, no problem.

Joy Gruver:

So right now our technology takes a lot yarn which then gets put into clothing. So our NIA platform is what I work on. So, and cellulose acetate gets used for lots of things sunglasses, that's where most people might have heard of it, but anyway, yeah. So we have this technology where we take mixed waste so it could be plastic waste too like that can't be mechanically recycled, where we can feed it through our carbon renewal technology and output new material from it. So the idea of doing material to material conversions, I think, is where we need to go as a society, not necessarily just waste to energy or waste to fuel. The idea of converting it into something else. That's like the holy grail.

Speaker 3:

And are there sustainability techniques that can be used higher up for the original materials, so that they are easier to feed into a process like yours when they're at the end of their life?

Joy Gruver:

Oh yeah, so there's a lot of the idea of design for circularity right now. So that's heavy right now, of what we in the textile world are working on. It's all about education, right, like what kind of dyes are you using? What kind of finishes are you using? Because those can influence the end of life. You know how do you mark the garment so you actually know what the content is right, and a lot of people tear away those labels. So it's like that's because they itch. Yeah, right, some of them do, some of them don't, but yes, yes, it gets annoying for a lot of people.

Speaker 3:

But that can be printed on the garment instead of on a separate tag.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, so there's like great technologies coming out there in the market and so I'm working with a lot of folks on those kind of missions and a lot of that actually is being kind of brought from the government itself, like the state of California has EPR on that. So we, which is extended producer responsibility, so brands are going to have to be held liable for end of life solutions for their garments, your garments, what you're wearing today, if you want to sell in the state of California. And it's all happening in Europe and it'll continue to move, I think, across this country. So, yeah, I think there's lots of companies working on new technologies. We're fortunate, working for Eastman, that we're running at scale today. We do have some limitations today around textile, taking back textile waste. We've done some demonstration projects and hopefully we continue that mission of figuring out how to unlock mixed textile waste. It's not easy, right? If it was easy, it would be done.

Allan Marks:

You said running at scale. What does that mean, Joy?

Joy Gruver:

Yeah, it means being able to take large, like you know, a container of waste material, waste garments, and feeding it through our process. So that's what I mean at scale. Some people are doing, you know, kind of very small scale, lab scale still.

Allan Marks:

Which is important for learning and testing. But to get to scale to look at the, which is important for learning and testing. But to get to scale to look at the size of the problem and the commercial scale allows you to have.

Speaker 3:

you've heard of economies of scale, right? Sure, it allows you to bring the unit cost down, and that makes it much more affordable and, frankly, profitable at some point.

Joy Gruver:

At some point, I mean right now, it's not super profitable. It's not profitable.

Allan Marks:

Yeah, so Joy. As we think about the sustainability, as we think about the component parts that you've just described, if someone listening wants to learn like if I want to make sure I'm buying stuff from an organization that's partnering with you, or others that are responsibly sourcing these materials, or if we just want to learn more about this, who are the leaders that you would point to right now? I know there's a lot of groups. Everyone's trying to figure this out, or most people are trying to figure this out, but who are the ones that are kind of taking a lead in your eyes that we could look to for inspiration, for learning?

Joy Gruver:

Like brands or publications.

Allan Marks:

I mean certainly brands Like if I want to buy Naya. I brands Like if I want to buy Naya. I'm not going and buying Naya, right, I'm buying products of others or recycling or finding used from these places Like where can I be looking to?

Speaker 3:

Or, for that matter, regulators too, For example California. I know on the website. Yeah, I think that.

Joy Gruver:

Well, looking at your brand I mean brands if they're a sustainable company, they're telling their story, right, they're going to be telling that story. So I think it's important for people to look at your labels. You know, don't just buy something because it looks cute or feels good. Go into that label. Take that next step and look at the hang tag. Look at the label, understand the ethos of the brand and who they are, and if they represent your same ethos Like as far as they talk about their labor practices, they talk about how they go about their material choices, right, some brands tell a better story than others, but I think, look, see what's important to you and what you value. Like, some people just don't like synthetics, right. So look at that label and you know, see what the content is. But so, I see, do your homework, and a lot of people don't do that.

Speaker 3:

Let me ask you on that question. So let's just take two hypothetical textiles right. One is vegetable, dyed natural. You know it's an animal, it's either cotton or maybe it's an animal wool of some kind, mm-hmm Um. And the other one is a synthetic but made in a relatively efficient, low-carbon way For your process and for circularity. Is the natural necessarily better or are there some advantages to having something coming into the process that can be reprocessed and reused that already was made out of a chemical process?

Joy Gruver:

Well, there's technologies now that can scale for polyester, for synthetics, and there's technologies that scale for natural fibers, for circularity. So the hard part is when they're mixed materials, right, I would say that there's like no specific, like holy grail, right it's. If you want a product that's going to last, like I keep my products for a long time, like oh my God, these jeans. I put them on this morning. I was like these are like eight years old, now nine years old and I'm like proud of myself.

Speaker 3:

I've been told you never throw anything away. Well, you know, maybe that's your name. Is time.

Joy Gruver:

But so you might want to look at synthetics, right, if you want to hold your materials for a longer period of time. Some of those natural dyes don't necessarily the colors don't last as long, and that's okay, like you might be fine with that. But again, reading your labels, understanding and figuring out what's important to you and how you're going to use that garment, I think can help make the choice Right. Did I answer that?

Allan Marks:

Yeah, Okay, so a theme we've been exploring in these podcast discussions is resilience. We've been talking about the importance of community and resilience being founded in kindness and generosity, and this is the first conversation we've kind of pulled out of just community response and activation to different types of resilience and sustainability. So Joy, as you're thinking about a resilient community like coming out of the fires, but also outside of crisis what do you think are the important parts of it that we need to have in place to be in the world you want to live in or you want your kid to be living in?

Joy Gruver:

I think, like being prepared, like one thing that this taught me is I was not prepared at all, like I didn't have all my documents in the right place, like I think that this, what happened, was a great wake up call for others to be prepared for situations, because you never know what's going to happen. And so when you think about resilience is I've had to overcome some really hardships in my life, right, and I feel like you can go one way and be like the poor me and feel sorry for yourself, which is okay. That's going to happen as part of the process, but part of the resilience is lifting yourself up from those dark days and moving on and being appreciative for what we actually have and relying on your friends and your community and not being afraid to ask for, like, what you need to help you get up tomorrow, you know.

Allan Marks:

And that's really hard for many. For me, it still is to ask anyone for anything, Because we're taught that right, and that's assuming I know what I need which often I don't. So how did you learn to do that?

Joy Gruver:

I don't know.

Allan Marks:

Still figuring it out.

Joy Gruver:

I don't know. I mean, not every day is easy, right, but at the end of the day, people are relying on you, you have responsibilities. You got to get up every day and you got to be okay with giving away a blanket that you've had, you know and making sacrifices.

Allan Marks:

We didn't know that this was your blanket, that you had packed as a go-bag.

Speaker 3:

You were before the blanket was an important part of the story. I want to come back to that. Tell me about the blanket.

Joy Gruver:

Well, it's so funny because I put it so I've had that blanket for a long time.

Allan Marks:

I don't know that. Nina's given it back to you. No, I don't want it.

Joy Gruver:

It makes my heart so happy. So there's been some situations that have happened in my life where, like Like this is a funny story I'll just share. We're probably over time, but I had a scarf this scarf that I bought years ago, right, and I loved this scarf, it was just awesome. And I was driving in LA one day and it was a cold day this is years ago and this woman on the street looked like she was freezing and she was right next to me and I'm stopped at a stoplight and I just look at her and I just couldn't, I, I took my scarf off.

Joy Gruver:

I gave it to her and I started crying as I'm driving away and I'm like I like it's just I don't know. So, um, it made me feel good, though, like, at the end of the day, like these are the things we need to do for each other, right, right, and it made you feel good, regardless of her reaction.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, whether she appreciated it or had gratitude to you or expressed anything, yeah, it didn't matter, it didn't care Like.

Joy Gruver:

I felt at that moment she needed it. She looked freezing and she needed help. You saw a need and you rose to the occasion. Yeah, and then I actually started when I would travel to colder communities, because I travel for work, especially like I go up to Vancouver and I bring an extra scarf and I put it on a homeless person when I was walking around. I didn't do that this year, but I did do it last year.

Joy Gruver:

Anyway, I think like if you could find something, those little things that you can do to help society, so the blanket society, so the blanket. So I had put a bunch of blankets in the car in preparation, had I had to leave my home and because of those dang alerts I was getting, and so when we went to bring you the basket, I actually was like, should I give him this blanket? Because I mean, why not give the blanket? And it wasn't the one my mom had knit, which she would have killed me because she only made me one so far. But so, yeah, I gave it. And the reaction of Nina and seeing your family's reaction over a blanket, that just warms my heart.

Speaker 3:

The blanket is a symbol of love. It is Somebody giving something.

Allan Marks:

I know and it's seeing warmth.

Speaker 3:

And then for Nina. I cannot speak for her, but there has got to be something of I have a need and it's being seen, I'm being seen.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

That's got to be important.

Joy Gruver:

Yeah.

Allan Marks:

We have another blanket story. That happened at the same time because Nina was aware that she didn't have a blanket and we're moving from hotel to hotel to Airbnb to whatever for months and she knew she wanted a blanket. So she reached out to my aunt my Aunt Jean quilts blankets and she goes Aunt, do you have a blanket? Because all of my family is trying to figure out how they can help and be present and stuff, and so, after it took about a month for this to come through because they wanted to make sure we were at the right address my aunt had quilted this one quilt for her husband who passed away, and this was the quilt that he was wrapped in for the years in the home he was in that was supporting him. She sent us that blanket.

Allan Marks:

So we have that quilt, which is stunning, it's beautiful and I cry every time I talk to my aunt about this. But nina's like that's almost too like. It's almost a display piece of the love that we have in the house and every now and then we'll wrap it around us, but it's the blanket you brought that has just became, uh, really, really important to her tangible evidence of the love.

Allan Marks:

Yeah, yeah, she and the dog were wrapped in it this morning when I left the house.

Speaker 3:

And I think there's a reason. Charles Schulz drew Linus with a security blanket and it was not called an insecurity blanket because it did in fact provide security.

Joy Gruver:

Yes, this is so true. It's funny how deep we can get on a blanket right and how meaningful a blanket is.

Allan Marks:

So for the Shared Ground podcast that we're doing, we have a colleague, corey, who's built a lot of the graphics and the brand and the merch page and all this stuff, and Corey went through every picture I took for three months and I've been taking a lot of pictures of these moments of kindness, one of the I just had a chance to write and substack about you and with you and Nina wrapped in the blanket, and that's the picture Corey grabbed. He grabbed two pictures to put on the front of the website. One was this hazy image of a sunset the day after the fire, the stunning sunset. The second picture is the one of you and Nina and that's the one that called through. And, alan, I think you're right that it's that image that many of us hold in common of this blanket that protects us.

Speaker 3:

Well, it's warmth in two ways it's the physical warmth, but it's also the human warmth.

Allan Marks:

Yeah, yeah, and I suspect that people listening to this conversation might hear where some of that warmth came from, right? So a question that we're also asking a lot of people. We're talking to Joy hope. So we're in a nutty time in the world. We're coming out of these fires like bad things are happening. There's tough stuff. Where are you seeing hope in the world, in your community, in the world, like what's keeping you grooving in these hard times?

Joy Gruver:

The kids right, like my kids, give me lots of hope for our future. Your kid gives me hope. I think the resilience of our kids help provide that level of hope and I see, even like for me working for the company I do, I'll plug them too because they deserve it. I'll plug them too because they deserve it. We're trying to do really crazy dynamic things in my industry and in my company. So I am excited every day to wake up and, trust me, I had to wake up at 4.30 yesterday morning. People don't do that unless you have hope and you believe in what you're doing, in the mission, that it's doing something. So it also gives me hope that companies like mine are finding solutions and investing in solutions to help clean up our world. So yeah, I guess I find hope in a lot of things. I'm definitely a glass half full kind of gal, I mean a name like.

Speaker 3:

Joy. If you weren't named Joy, that would be less of a pressure, exactly, no pressure.

Joy Gruver:

It's seriously right. It's a tough name to live up to, I'm sure, but I try to serve it well, so yeah.

Allan Marks:

And I'd say, an addition of hope for me after a lot of these conversations is seeing that folks like you are taking an interest in the young kids to be able to help them kind of see pathways, see hope themselves in that you're showing up and part of a LinkedIn audience. That is right, it's really great and I'm really grateful that you came to join us today. Thanks for everything you've done for my family and for people around us and also just being our friend. So we're going to. We've written about some more stuff with you and I hope everyone listening to this podcast has a chance to understand why we, alan and I, were really excited for you to join us. So thank you so much for being here today, joy, yes, thank you, Joy.

Speaker 3:

thank you so much.

Joy Gruver:

Thank you. You give me hope too. Look at what you're trying, what you're accomplishing here. Like this gives people hope that they can get through these situations, like you and your family are getting through Well, and they can get through situations, absolutely, I know.

Speaker 3:

You know, sean, I was talking to you about one of my favorite books, you know, by Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning, man's Search for Meaning. And this attitude we bring to the worst situations influences the response much more than the situation itself.

Allan Marks:

And in that book which I think is a great way to take us out of this podcast, and I think you exemplify this Joy Frankl talks about how the character of a person is revealed and how they choose to respond to suffering Not that that because we all suffer, and also he talks about how there's there's no relative suffering, my suffering isn't worse than your suffering, or but it's how we respond in those times. And I'd say for us, how you respond in those times is directly influenced by the community that you're blessed to have around you yes, so that individual response creates that community amen.

Allan Marks:

Thank you, joyce, so much for taking the time together and thank you for joining us in this episode of Shared Ground. We hope you continue listening, and I'm Sean and really glad to have this day with y'all. I'm Alan, thanks much. This has been another episode of Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community Follow us on your favorite platform or learn more at sharedgroundcom.

Speaker 3:

That's shared-groundcom.