Joyce Lewis-Andrews. Author of The Secret-Keepers’ Stories

Joyce Lewis-Andrews has been an avid storyteller and communicator for philanthropic organizations from 1993-2021 in roles as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer for three Girl Scout Councils in western Pennsylvania; and as Executive Director for two private charitable foundations — McGuire Memorial Foundation and Vincentian Charitable Foundation. Those testimonials, first-hand accounts, and motivating stories increased membership, recruited and retained volunteers, raised awareness, generated more than ten million dollars in philanthropic support, and sold a ton of cookies. During that time, her teams earned several MarCom and PR awards for campaigns and publications in the nonprofit sector. 

Professionally and personally, she motivated and mentored hundreds of other storytellers too. While at Vincentian, Lewis-Andrews also developed “The Book of Life” program in 2014, inspired by the storytelling of her Grandaunt Clara — connecting nursing home residents and volunteers through the art of reminiscent therapy. What story-keepers and storytellers gained from the experience was, of course, life changing. During that time — from 2009-2022, she also served as an Executive Service Corps volunteer consultant with the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management — creating content and assisting dozens of grassroots and nationally-affiliated organizations with strategic planning, marketing, and governance challenges. In 2011, she authored and published “Dancing with a Pink Slip” — a guide to re-branding your professional image and ambitions after fifty. 

Prior to her work in the nonprofit sector, she was a freelance writer and producer of industrial films and videos for corporations across the region such as Westinghouse, American Trucking Association, and United States Steel. That was after a brief theater and cabaret career.

The prologue of her debut work of creative nonfiction, The Secret-Keepers’ Stories, has been published as The Storyteller’s Prologue with The Northern Appalachia Review, Volume Six - March 2025.

Contact Joyce for more information about The Secret-Keepers’ Stories.

In May 2021, I retired from my nonprofit leadership job to work on the to-do list that I’d been putting off for years. Believe it or not, writing this book wasn’t one of my top five priorities, although I have tried telling these stories in multiple ways over the years. 

Before the cardboard boxes from my workplace office were completely decommissioned, I learned that my mother’s family house on Main Street in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh had burned to the ground. Fortunately, no lives were lost. By then, my Williams-Lewis relatives had all moved out and been gone for decades, yet the emptiness I experienced was as gaping of a hole as the one that now exists between 4120 and 4116 in that stretch of city block.

Its living room, dining room, and kitchen hosted the joys and sadnesses of over a dozen Christmas and wakes. It was the scene of my grandaunt and her no-good-bum husband’s wedding reception, and I imagined it as Ground Zero when my mother’s Deep Dark Secret was revealed. It symbolized my maternal family’s success in overcoming a multi-generational struggle out of oppression and poverty. If walls could talk, those would be the ones you’d expect to spill the beans. Today, it is a tiny memorial of space, and it’s hard to imagine how all eleven of them could have squeezed into its footprint. That six-room house, once wedged shoulder-to-shoulder with her sister buildings on Main Street, is now an empty plot in the shape of thousands of stories gone.

There are too many places like that. 

I hope you enjoy my family’s storytelling legacy and are inspired to leave yours behind.