When I talked with ATA board member Ginger Jones for this blog post, she had recently returned from hiking 180 miles of the Portuguese Camino de Santiago. Walking the ancient paths and Roman roads of this pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela took Ginger nearly three weeks to complete, every step connecting her with the region’s history and people as well as her fellow travelers from around the world.
Ginger’s life is punctuated with deep-dive travel experiences. A proponent of any travel that expands one’s view of the world, she herself prefers to go beyond the typical tourist experience. Instead, she often lives as a community member and immerses herself in the local language and culture. Her first taste of this type of travel was in high school during an exchange program to Australia. “As a student, I recognized early on how much I loved learning about different ways of life,” she remembers.
Ginger’s interest in other cultures has guided much of her personal life, as well as her long career in the nonprofit space. After graduating from college, she was involved for several years with study abroad programs, hoping to give students the same impactful experience she had enjoyed. “I think it’s good for young people to have the opportunities to travel and live,” she says, “especially in poorer communities where there are really amazing values of family, community, and hard work.”
In 1991, Ginger was ready to take her international focus to the next level when she packed her bags and moved to Brattleboro, Vermont to earn her master’s degree at the School for International Training (SIT). “I left my home state of Texas and a bit of an insular, protected world,” she admits. “Brattleboro is a small community, but it has a huge global vision, and the SIT campus attracts people from all over the world. It was truly a life-changing experience and opened my eyes to a bigger world.”
Once she received her master’s degree from SIT, she worked for the school for ten years, eventually serving as its director of development. Later she moved to Maine where she became director of development for the Maine Audubon Society (Environmentalism is another passion of hers).
Now retired, Ginger considers Maine her home. An outdoors person and aspiring naturalist, she can often be found birding, tracking fish migrations, and enjoying Maine’s mountains and ocean.
Quick to share her community, she is also deeply involved with welcoming immigrants to her state. She teaches English as a second language and mentors immigrant families, helping them to navigate the complexities of finding housing, jobs, and transportation and easing their transition to a new country.
Looking back, Ginger has worked and traveled in Latin America, Africa, Nepal, Far East Russia, and Asia. In fact, it was on one of her immersive trips that she first heard about ATA. The year was 2019 and she and her husband, Ken, were at the end of an eight-month trip that took them to Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and their last stop, Peru. One day, while visiting a tiny shop in Chinchero, she came across some beautiful textiles handwoven by weavers from the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC). She was intrigued and later went to CTTC’s Cusco headquarters, where she met their education director Sarah Lyon. Sarah just happened to be a fellow SIT graduate. They hit it off immediately.
During their visit, Sarah told Ginger about CTTC’s connection to Andean Textile Arts in the United States. But it wasn’t until she returned to Maine, contacted ATA board members Marilyn Murphy and Betty Doerr, and started to volunteer that Ginger began to understand the depth of ATA’s involvement with Andean communities. “I was so impressed that I continued to volunteer and got more and more involved to the point that I became a board member in 2021,” she says.
Ginger has brought a lot of experience to ATA, particularly in the areas of fundraising and tour planning where she has helped explore additional Andean countries for partnerships and investigated ways to enhance textile travel for our participants. “We want our tours to be an exchange of ideas, views, weaving passion, and techniques—not just about being tourists,” she explains.
Although she is not a weaver herself, Ginger has had a life-long fascination with the textile arts. “My mom and grandmother were amazing at handwork,” she says. “I was probably about six years old when I first started to do needlepoint, crewel, and embroidery and continue to do them.” Not surprising, her home is filled with textiles she has brought back from her many travels.
For Ginger, her involvement with ATA’s mission is a natural extension of her personal principles. “It’s about economic development, sustainability, women’s empowerment, art, and historical and cultural preservation,” she says. “All of my values are woven together in the textile world and the work we do.”
