The Team
Across borders and generations, we share the work of care and becoming.
We are a growing collective whose lives and lineages reach across four continents. Held together by trust and cooperation, we move in the long rhythm of renewal — tending what was given, and growing what will endure.
Founding Members
Rev. Diane Ford Dessables
Founder
“I do not try to convert; I would much rather converse.”
Rev. Diane Ford Dessables’ vocation arose from a spiritual awakening in Haiti in 2009, where she witnessed the power of ancestral memory and cooperative practice to sustain communities through crisis. Her work weaves faith, healing, and economic sufficiency into a living ministry of remembrance and transformation. In founding Gemstones in the Sun, she envisioned a global community where people of color could practice self‑actualized healing, not as folks to be fixed, but as creators of balance, belonging, and shared abundance. Her leadership embodies a theology of wholeness — one that flows inward to outward, from recovery to renewal.
Paul Delaney
ChIEf Editor
Paul Delaney’s lifelong commitment to truth and community mirrors GITS’s own philosophy of transformation through remembrance. As one of the first Black reporters in The New York Times’ Washington Bureau, he chronicled stories of resilience and systemic change with courage and clarity. Today, as Blog Editor and Elder Journalist for Gemstones in the Sun, Paul continues to mentor with presence — embodying healing as activism through the written word, storytelling as restoration, and journalism as collective memory.