It is with great sadness that we announce the passing away of Jacqueline. Some of you may already know our longtime mentor and great friend, Jacqueline, passed away this week.
Jacqueline and her amazing sister, Roxanne Stone, have been our inspiration, educator, and resource for 13 years. Their tireless work to make the world better created the foundation for our community. In many ways they made Hero’s Pets success possible. Through their passion they enabled us to join their mission and make it a platform for activism and education.
The past two years have been so hard for Jacqueline, Roxanne and the farmers. And it’s been hard for us seeing them go through it, and doing everything we could to help even at great personal risk. We, too, all suffered over the breakup of their beloved company. The loss of their presence in the industry was devastating to pet health, activism, regenerative agriculture and minority families alike. As we lost them, they and the farmers suffered through more than a year of punishment via litigation from the management of the company they’d built, loved and lost… they all lost their work, their livelihoods, their savings/retirement, their passion, each other… But they kept working and persevering. They created Kure, and when that was blocked, they helped Solutions. Nothing could stop them from making a difference.
Since the trial ended Jacqueline’s optimism returned in her work with Solutions. She long ago welcomed us into her heart, and now we welcomed her into our team. She has always made us a priority and been available to help us. Her incredible joy in making each product filled us with her enthusiasm. Jacqueline’s happiness was tangible when a product came out perfectly. And she shared that happiness with us. It infused our work with meaning every single day. Since 2009, when she first began work with us, we have experienced the blessing of that meaning in our own work.
In the past ~month we’ve come full circle. We got to be there when her joy came back. We got to share those precious moments of glee over the beauty of a new Solutions product made manifest. We had the thrill of our mentor’s excitement about products we made, inspired by her life’s work. We got to participate in this magical crafting process with her, which had always awed us from a distance.
We felt her joy and anticipation as she joined our team, and “you’re going to do this!” became “WE are going to do this!” She quickly became a part of our work. We created this project well enough to get THE amazing Jacqueline onboard and truly ecstatic! What an achievement for all of us together. And we had the great blessing of helping her heal from the trauma of the past year.
And I cannot tell you what an impact she’s made on us just within the past few weeks. A miracle is an event that impacts time. It leaps you forward past years of work. It puts you in a new and better place. And that’s what she did for us just last week. She made miracles happen. She propelled us into the future. She erased years of struggle. She is a true miracle worker.
She is still, and always will be all these things. All the gifts she gave us and our community are still intact and will go on into the future.
The work she did in the past week will connect Solutions to its new community. Though her journey was cut short, this will extend the impact she’s had on the Hero’s community to people all over the US. It will amplify and perpetuate the meaning and impact she’s always imparted to our work. We are fortunate to have a future filled with work in tandem with her amazing family (Roxanne Stone and the farmers) that made her proud of everything she did – to honor her legacy and complete the mission she was working so hard to achieve – through Solutions Pet Products. Really, we are all fortunate to have each other. And we are blessed to have an extended family of the holistic pet food community – all the activists that also work hard to create a legacy of her mission.
In many ways everything we do is in honor of her and always will be.
If you would like to donate funds towards her funeral expenses, supporting those she’s left behind and continuing her legacy please donate to the Royal Animal Health University Foundation, 501(c)(3) (82-5275008) – state that you are donating to the “JACQUELINE FUND” – Thank you Dr. Barbara Royal for being kind enough to assist with the daunting task of helping with donations that so many people have kindly already offered.
Thank you, also, for your continued commitment to making sure Jacqueline’s work never stops – Roxanne Stone, all the PA farmers (you are the salt of the earth and mean the world to this mission), the Solutions team (@ChelseaKent, @KathyKent, @JonathanJames, @EricNault, @JoshHeim, @LogynnHailley, @AngelaRobertson), @SusanThixton, @CathyAlinovi, @KarenBecker, @RodneyHabib, @JudyMorgan, @GwenCampbell, @BillyHoekman, @AmrysWang, @LaurieCoger, @RachelFusaro, @TwoCrazyCatLadies, @BarbaraRoyal, @NatashaLilly, @SteveBrown, @ErikaMartinGibbs, @JosieBeug. If I missed you, thank you for being a part of the holistic pet food movement, too. It’s hard to think of everyone through the tears.
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