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 is the founder of Gemstones in the Sun, a global community devoted to healing, remembrance, and cooperative flourishing among people of color. Her vocation emerged from a profound spiritual awakening during a visit to Haiti in 2009, where ancestral memory and present-day realities braided together in ways that reshaped the course of her life and ministry.
Deeply shaped by her own journey through dyslexia and learning to read and write later in life, Diane’s work centers the transformative power of story, voice, and spiritual practice. In 2019, she launched the Gemstones in the Sun blog on Juneteenth as a gathering place for reflection and healing across the United States. One year later, she founded Gemstones in the Sun, Inc., a nonprofit organization creating spaces for global communities of color to cultivate health, economic sufficiency, and freedom from the harms of modernity’s cultural entanglements.
Her ministry and advocacy have spanned decades and continents—from grassroots campaigns in Virginia’s Tidewater region to global anti-hunger initiatives through Bread for the World and vocational work with the 6,000 congregations of the United Church of Christ.
Diane is also the author of We Were Seeds: An Illustrated Novella of Healing and Transformation, a work that explores the journey from personal and collective trauma toward renewal through love, spiritual awareness, and communal responsibility. The book reflects the same commitments that animate Gemstones in the Sun: healing, hope, and the creation of life-affirming futures.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts with a concentration in theatrical directing from the University of the District of Columbia and a master’s degree in Divinity and Communication from Boston University. She integrates performance, media, storytelling, and spirituality in her work as a minister, writer, and cultural practitioner.
A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Diane is a bisexual woman and a member of the recovery community. She is joyfully wed to Rev. Djaloki Dessables. Together they are the parents of four adult children. Diane uses she/her pronouns.
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.