Dr. Joyce Dixon Hightower is a medical physician, achieved creator, speaker, and compassionate humanitarian who has been educating, feeding, and housing marginalized youth, empowering girls, and strengthening African communities and households for over 30 years.
Hightower grew up in a poor rural space in Northern Los Angeles County underneath the sturdy affect of group service from her father, Superintendent Samuel Dixon, pastor of Macedonia Church of God in Christ, and mom, Evelyn Dixon, medical technologist. Her work expertise in Africa started in 1977 as a highschool science trainer in rural Kenya. In response to the problem to extend the variety of the nation’s candidates for medical faculty, Hightower returned to the U.S. and accomplished medical faculty in 1988.
Whereas working towards in central California, Hightower led medical mission groups to Kenya and supported orphanages and rural clinics with provides. In 2001, a novel medical mission journey to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Central Africa brought on a dramatic change within the path of her life. In 2002, Hightower returned to DRC as a volunteer public well being enchancment guide.
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In 2009, Hightower started working for the World Well being Group (WHO) within the African Area. She discovered methods to assist orphans, particularly in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, whereas persevering with to develop DRC efforts.
In 2012, she based the Dixon-Hightower Basis, a 501c3 group that uniquely centered on offering ongoing charitable and high quality training to assist orphans, widows, and marginalized folks worldwide.
Winding her WHO efforts down for retirement, in 2015, Hightower was despatched to Guinea Conakry to steer the WHO struggle in opposition to the Ebola pandemic. It turned out to be one of many excessive achievement factors of her profession. After returning to the U.S., she started working in a neighborhood clinic to assist the DRC orphanage and faculty and retired once more in 2021.
Outlining her plans, Hightower defined, “As in different tasks in varied international locations during the last 30 years, the one deliberate within the DRC will likely be self-sufficient when accomplished. The Strong Rock Youth Complicated (SRYC) venture within the (DRC) has lasted the longest and acquired a major monetary funding due to its strategic capability to influence the best want.
“We’re giving livelihood coaching for widows, offering housing for orphans, and have 200 college students attending (pre-school by way of sixth grade presently occupying a lot of the orphanage constructing). Our faculty has a 100% nationwide examination go price, and the demand for placement for orphans and college students has skyrocketed,” she stated.
“We should increase $700,000 to finish the varsity constructing, seventh by way of twelfth grade, for over 4 hundred kids. As soon as the varsity strikes out of the orphanage constructing, we may settle for extra child orphans.”
Hightower’s uncle, the honorable Bishop Roy Dixon, D.D., jurisdictional prelate of Southern California 4th Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, Church of God in Christ, stated, “I’ve been to the Congo and visited the varsity, orphanage, and widows’ venture comprising the Strong Rock Youth Complicated sponsored by the Dixon-Hightower Basis. It’s such an uncommon factor that my niece is doing. She’s an M.D. and offers 90% of her wage to this work within the Congo. There are a lot of miraculous tales to inform.”
Dixon continued, “She constructed the orphanage, and 17 homeless, fatherless, and motherless kids name SRYC dwelling. They’re at that faculty day and evening as a result of that is their dwelling. She’s their mom, she is their father, and that is the one hope these kids and plenty of others have.
“Not solely is she offering for these kids bodily, emotionally, and educationally on the faculty that she is constructing, however she can also be placing them by way of larger grades in different services all through the Congo.”
When requested, what’s your need for the ladies, kids, and folks within the Congo the place you’re nonetheless serving to and have invested so a few years?
Hightower acknowledged, “I would really like this venture to face as an encouraging instance of hope and self-sufficiency through the use of assist instruments supplied and dealing laborious collectively. I would like the those that we assist to know that God hears their prayers wherever they’re and supplies for them.
“Similar to God put it in my coronary heart to come back all the best way from Newhall, California, He can hear their prayers to do no matter He places of their hearts to do.”
Sharing what she’d like her life to replicate, Hightower stated, “I would like the most important message of my life to be that God places in your coronary heart what He makes use of to indicate His greatness, love, and almighty energy. We’ve got the privilege of becoming a member of in these loving acts.”
To lend assist, go to: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=USX9VBUBN32HQ or https://gofund.me/a416541f
Study extra at: https://www.dixonhightowerfoundation.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/firm/dixon-hightower-foundation
