We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rochella Jones a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rochella, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
While some people daydream about hundreds of different possibilities without ever settling on one, others spend their life focused on a single goal. For me? I’ve pursued as many of my goals as I could. I have run a small holistic health company, Blue Organic Kitchen, LLC, since 2014. Hello, my name is Rochella, and I am a Minnesotan. I offer a variety of high-quality, organic vitamins, as well as wellness seminars, private nutrition counseling, detoxification, and other services. Because I am proud to be a deaf owner, the main audience is people who are also deaf. I am aware of and appreciate my deaf client’s need to continue their journey to wellness. I can help my deaf customers and clients better. I use American Sign Language, our native language, when I talk to them. The more I use American Sign Language, the more I am able to make connections for my deaf clients to understand their health problems and how the body functions. I love my job as it’s my life’s work to make a difference in the lives of deaf people about healthy lifestyle choices, how the body works, and non-traditional ways to deal with health problems.
In addition to being a wife, a parent, and a fur-mom, I am also a proud aunt to 12 wonderful nieces and nephews. I’ve also learned how to write, read, hike, travel, fix things around the house, repurpose things, and craft, in addition to growing and preserving my own food. I consider myself a girl that enjoys every moment of life. There’s a good reason I’m doing all these things, though.
Death has a funny way of putting people in unusual mindsets. When something shakes you to your very core, you may start to wonder why you’re even here. When I was 29 and 31, respectively, I experienced the tragic shock of losing my sister, who was 34, and my mother, who was 63. That’s when I discovered that it’s pointless to stress over meeting societal norms and, even worse, that nothing is ever guaranteed. During my time of grief, I hit rock bottom and was able to pull myself back up by forgiving myself and accepting my situation. I overcame my fear and began the process of renovating our kitchen without any money at all. Our only option was to take out a loan for the purpose. The kitchen in my mother’s rural home was always unappealing. It’s something I do for both of us. So, it is how my company, Blue Organic Kitchen, LLC, was created. Just as I am where I am now because I made a conscious effort to live my life without fear, I believe that when you decide to just follow your purpose, it will guide you where you mean to go.
It all began when I was a kid.
I owe everything to my deaf parents, who demonstrated the value of following one’s passion by starting their own business—Living Food Farm—and making their dreams a reality. When I was a kid, they were the people I looked up to the most. As kids, our parents took care of us in unusual ways. For example, they fed us vegetables, made whole-wheat bread at home, and kept our medicine cabinet full of herbs and vitamins instead of prescription drugs. My only real medical care as a kid was the occasional sports physical. This behavior even extended to how I treated my own daughter. Here I am, living my life as I know it. I come from a vast, extended family of deaf people on my mother’s side, and I’m the fifth of five kids. My parents sent all of us kids to a deaf school in Minnesota. Then I completed my bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. After my now-husband and I met in college and married, we returned to Minnesota to work for Living Food Farm. I worked in customer service, as a newsletter editor, and customer support, mainly for deaf customers. That’s when I learned that the deaf community is behind when it comes to things like holistic health practices, organic food, and alternative medicine. Accessibility problems, like a lack of easily available interpreters or the fact that most online video content is in English instead of American Sign Language, which is our native language, made it hard for us to use the information to benefit our health naturally. I felt compelled to start a business to help deaf people deal with their unique problems. Before that, I went to school to get a certificate in holistic nutrition so I could start my business and share holistic information and a more natural way of living with the ASL-using deaf community. People who are deaf and whose first language is American Sign Language will benefit a lot from getting information in ASL. I wanted a place to gather and disseminate knowledge about healthy eating and lifestyle, so I made an Instagram account under the handle @BlueOrganicKitchen.
Since 2014, I’ve been running a business and have had to overcome a number of challenges. I can assure you that as my list of deaf clients grew, so did my passion. Their experiences, however heartbreaking, motivate me to fulfill my life’s mission here on Earth. Deprivation of language and misinformation are causing physical and mental hardships for my people. Western medical professionals have no patience for those who are deaf, deafblind, or hard of hearing. Deaf people are denied access to vital health information. Most of the time, a single written statement is not enough for the patient to understand what the diagnosis means or what the next steps are in the treatment plan. What I did was empower them. To further assist them in caring for themselves, I translate their medical diagnosis into American Sign Language and provide an explanation of how their body works. To be honest, I look forward to going to work every day. My goal in life is to help the deaf understand how natural treatments and healthy lifestyle choices can help them.
To close this, I will continue doing what I love, and I think it is a success for me to live my purpose. Even though I don’t have a lot of money, the experiences, challenges, and triumphs against health barriers I gained from working with deaf customers more than make up for it. Doing what you’re passionate about transforms labor into an exhilarating experience. When I think about my sister and mother, who both passed away, I realize that stress is not what life is about. Recognize your happiness and count your blessings; it’s important to keep things in perspective.
Rochella, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Rochella Jones is deaf and runs a small holistic health business that helps people in the deaf community who are deprived of language access alternative treatments. In her free time, she likes to go hiking, read romance novels, garden, and take trips in a camper with her husband, daughter, and two yellow labradors.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
The fact that I have low vision and am deaf from birth means that I am considered to be deafblind. Since I can still drive and perform most other daily tasks, I rarely think of myself as blind. As a person who is both visually impaired and profoundly deaf, I have unique challenges. I will eventually lose my right to drive due to the degenerative nature of my eye condition. In light of my developmental disabilities, I decided to start my own internet business so that I could pursue my life’s work without letting my disability hold me back.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
For me, it’s important to be true to my own set of fundamental values as I started my business. We in the deaf community are quite small in number, yet we have no trouble establishing relationships with people from all over the United States and the world. My parents competed in Deaf Olympics as a basketball player and as a swimmer. My older brother and sisters participated in sports at Gallaudet and in the Deaf Olympics. Every aspect of my business, from marketing to customer service, is guided by my commitment to telling the truth. Fortunately, I am not the type of person who hesitates before speaking the truth, so this was simple for me to do.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.BlueOrganicKitchen.com
- Instagram: @BlueOrganicKitchen
- Youtube: Blue Organic kitchen