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Speak with Ivory Morris today, and you might see a soft-spoken woman whose gentle demeanor belies the resolve just below the surface. Her benign outward appearance has served her well. It allows her to quietly observe the lay of the land, assess challenges and opportunities and work toward achieving her goals.

Her goals are often centered on helping others, such as when she volunteers time as the president of the ���۴�ý (UOPX) or helps the homeless in her community. Other times, her goals are professional, like earning her associate degree and bachelor’s degree as she strove to enhance her career prospects.

But before any of that, her goal was just to survive.

“My father was abusive,” Morris explains, “so we grew up in an abusive household where he was beating on our mom. And [the woman] who was supposed to be our babysitter was his girlfriend. So, we got to be in the midst of all that.”

Perhaps this transformative love is when Morris’ steadfast commitment to children was born. She is devoted to children — her own, her community’s — and their well-being. But that commitment was challenged when she and her son were living in foster care after being taken away from Morris’ mother. By the time she was 19, Ivory successfully petitioned for custody of her son who’d been separated from her for six or seven months, and they moved to Arizona.

Soon, Ivory had her own apartment and focused on raising her son while making a living. Her parenting method was as direct as her communication style: “I tried to do everything that my parents did not do and tried to avoid the things that they did do.”

Her method worked. “He didn’t get the best mom while he was growing up,” Morris says of her oldest child. “But he did have a good mom. He had a mom who understood that she didn’t want him to be subjected to abuse. That change was necessary. That learning more about behaviors and mental health was necessary. That being better was necessary. That constantly improving and absorbing information was necessary. So, he got a good mom.”

Morris’ drive toward constant improvement led her to UOPX, where she earned her associate degree in business and her bachelor’s degree in human services management. (The latter program has since been retired.) The journey wasn’t easy. At first, she was told no grants were available to her, but she refused to take no for an answer and found one especially for foster kids and parents. 

She worked full time, raised her son and, eventually, found love. She and Alandus met online in 2001, got married a year later and by 2015 were living debt-free as a dual-income family with four children. Morris was ready to resign from her full-time job and focus on passion projects, like baking for her church and helping children in her community build life skills.

The fly in the ointment came one week later when her husband got laid off.

True to form, Morris didn’t panic. She planned. They’d saved up some money and could sustain themselves on that while they moved to Virginia to be closer to Alandus’ family. There, Morris turned her passion for baking and cooking into a business: . When her family experienced two unrelated health crises, she turned JMT Sweets to a vegan-only enterprise.

That expanded to classes designed to teach cooking and life skills to teenagers and adults in Chesapeake, Virginia. When the pandemic put a stop to those plans, Morris pivoted and invested in a food trailer.