Joanne Turner, RN, APN, MSN is the founder and executive director of The Caring Network, Volunteer Services a New Jersey nonprofit Corporation which was incorporated in 1994 as a 501-C-3 organizaton. She earned a bachelor’s degree in science at the University of Pennsylvania and worked in surgical critical care nursing at HUP. Her masters’ degrees are from Widener University with a focus on Head Trauma and from UMDNJ/Rutgers in Psych-Mental Health. She pioneered and led the Central and Northern NJ Parish Nursing (Congregational Health) Networks for more that a decade. For more than 40 years she has worked professionally as a nurse and recently left her role as an Advanced Practice Nurse serving on the medical staff in Neuroscience at a large medical system in New Jersey. She presently does medication management as a Nurse Practitioner (NP) in Psych-Mental Health at the Mental Health Association of Essex and Morris in Montclair. Her passion is to see individual, community and nation transformation that are measurable in the areas of health and wholeness. She has “adopted” the health care industry as a “nation” and Newark as a “City on a Hill”.

She co-authored The Street Adopter’s Handbook (2011) with her late husband Lloyd. After his death she was invited to serve as a member of the Executive Leadership Team for the TransformOurWorld (TOW) network. A lifelong Presbyterian, she embraces the reformed traditions of the priesthood of all believers and what is commonly called the “protestant work ethic” or as described in the TOW’s paradigms “Every Christian is a minister and labor is worship”. She is ordained both as an elder and a deacon in the Presbyterian church and taught adult education and small home groups through the New Providence Presbyterian Church. There she led prayer, healing and deliverance ministry and pioneered the Streams class with her late husband Lloyd, which looks at the major traditions in the Christian faith to learn from each. She also trained a team of healing prayer and deliverance ministers in partnership with the Dunamis Project of the Presbyterian and Reformed Ministries International team.

After her husband’s death she relocated to Little Egg Harbor, NJ to be near her two granddaughters and her younger son who is a veterinarian. Her first son also lives in NJ and is a contractor as a mechanical engineer for the Navy.