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11/25/2015 07:30 AMMaureen Jones is the personification of the “work hard, play hard” philosophy.
She served on Madison’s Board of Assessment Appeals, volunteers with Birthright in Clinton and the Caregivers Support Group of the Visiting Nurses’ Association, and owned her own insurance agency, Jones Insurance Services. She’s a member of the Women’s Club of Madison and also recently received a Volunteer of the Year award from the Town of Madison.
“I have been with VNA in Guilford as a volunteer and as a buddy probably about 14 years or so,” she says. “The buddy program was implemented by VNA to have volunteers working with and befriending caregivers, and as a result of that program I have a buddy now. I meet with her—we have coffee and lunch, and we chat together. I’m also on the advisory council of VNA.”
The Madison resident and her husband, Clarance, recently returned from a trip to Croatia.
“We take an educational tour every year,” Maureen says. “One that’s very strenuous; you’re up between 5:30 and 7 in the morning. We traveled to four countries. We generally travel to places about which we know nothing. This was [to the former] communist bloc of Yugoslavia. We visited Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia—all fabulous, beautiful places.
“We had actually chosen Israel, but we canceled it because of all the fighting. This was our second choice. But we’ve gone to South Africa, southeast Asia, and China, just kind of ‘bucket list’ destinations. We’ve done it every year for the last four or five years.”
After retiring in 2008 from her insurance company, Maureen was a consultant for various agents.
She explains, “My specialty was medical insurance, life insurance, and long-term care. Long-term care was my love, because my education is as a psychotherapist, so it’s naturally easy for me to listen, and long-term care insurance seems to be a little more complicated than medical insurance and life insurance. So I went from counseling clients to insurance. I loved every minute and when I left, some of the agents would call and ask me to consult for them, which I did for a couple years. Then I got back into volunteering. I was raised to know that if you have good health, you have a job to volunteer.”
Maureen, the daughter of immigrants from Northern Ireland, has been volunteering since 8th grade when she attended a Catholic school in Paterson, New Jersey, where she grew up. She served meals at a home for women and then volunteered as a candy striper at a local hospital the entire time she was in high school.
Another cause dear to her heart is her church, North Madison Congregational.
“I volunteer on every single activity we have,” she says. “It’s a small congregation, one of the most amazing congregations that each of us have ever belonged to in that people are so caring and so concerned about every single congregant. If they’re sick, or anything’s going on, we call them and just make sure that they’re okay. [Madison residents] Kathy and Roger Dann had an automobile accident last year, and Clarance is donating 10 percent of the proceeds of his book [Triumph] to them.
“We love the church, that’s a very big part of our lives. I think it’s because it’s a small congregation, everybody does everything—setting up before church, cleaning up after church when we have fellowship.”
Maureen also plays tennis, walks two miles a day, and she and Clarance play golf twice a week at the Madison Country Club. The couple has been married 28 years and has three adult children—Clarance’s daughter lives in Chicago, and Maureen’s two sons live in Guilford and Maine—and four grandchildren. Maureen and Clarance spend winters in Sarasota, Florida, but it’s not all golf and beach time—they volunteer reading to kindergarteners at a local school.
To nominate someone for Person of the Week, email Melissa at m.babcock@shorepublishing.com.