Jo Ellis of Searcy said she initially had “no interest” in going to Ireland to be a missionary, but she was there for three years.
“The biggest thing in Ireland is that’s where the idea for Make.Do was born. That definitely had a lasting impact on what I’m doing now,” she said.
Make.Do, the nonprofit business she founded almost three years ago, offers “creative classes to the public,” she said, such as quilting, sewing and painting.
It was a runner-up on the Small Business Revolution-Main Street contest that Searcy won last year.
The city, one of 12,000 applicants, won the Small Business Revolution-Main Street contest and received $500,000 for six businesses to get makeovers. Searcy was featured in October on Season 4 of the online and Hulu series. Ty Pennington and Amanda Brinkman are the co-hosts of the show, which is sponsored by Deluxe, a national marketing company.
The $4,000 that Ellis received from the fund Searcy started during the Small Business Revolution contest, plus a grant from Main Street Searcy, allowed her to move from a hidden, upstairs space to the heart of downtown.
“It really opened the doors for us, literally, to open doors in our new studio,” she said. “Now, we have two spaces next door to each other on a corner in downtown Searcy. It’s accessible, and visibility is times a thousand.”
Ellis, executive director of Make.Do, teaches about half of all the classes offered, including the six-week quilting classes. Other instructors are volunteers and get class credit equivalent to a class they teach, she said.
Ellis has suggested fees for people who enroll in the classes, but the fees are “pay what you can.”
“When people register for a class online, they get to name their own price. Most people pay what is suggested. Some will pay a little more; some pay less or pay nothing. It makes it where anybody in our community can attend. There’s no exclusivity,” she said. Her website is makedocreate.org.
Amy Burton, executive director of Main Street Searcy, said she’s happy that Make.Do was a runner-up.
“I feel that Amanda Brinkman with Deluxe just loved Jo, and it was such a hard decision. When it came down to it, Jo is very savvy and very good at what she does. I think Deluxe felt like there was more of a need with some of the other businesses,” Burton said.
She said Ellis has filled a niche in Searcy.
“She provides such a great artistic outlet, and it’s open for everyone. And I feel that she’s done — although her classes are not exclusive to women — a phenomenal job in embracing women and girls and giving them a creative outlet, regardless of whether they can pay or their station in life.”
Ellis, whose 36th birthday is today, started Make.Do three years ago in March when she came back to Searcy from Ireland. A pivotal experience for her as a missionary there was working as a camp counselor with troubled teenage girls.
As a 2005 graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Ellis wanted to come back to start her career, she said.
She grew up in Midland, Texas, and attended Harding University’s Honors Symposium between her junior and senior years of high school, because “my mom made me,” Ellis said.
“I threw the invitation away because I thought it was like nerd camp,” Ellis said.
Afterward, she had to admit that her mother was right.
“You get to pretend you’re in college for two weeks. I really enjoyed the experience and made friends,” she said.
Ellis went to Harding and majored in interior design.
“That’s about the time the show Trading Spaces came on, so I remember watching that — binge-watching before binge-watching was a thing — and I liked the problem-solving aspect of it and the color, and I was like, Hey, this is like a thing.’”
During her junior year, she decided interior design wasn’t right for her, although she considered using it for architecture.
“I didn’t love [interior design] enough to put in my dues for it to get where I wanted it to be,” Ellis said. After graduation, she immediately started working toward a Master of Business Administration degree.
“I knew I didn’t want to sit behind a desk or work for a big company. I wanted purpose, which I don’t mean it to sound like people who work behind a desk don’t have purpose, but I didn’t think that would be a satisfying way for me to spend 40 hours or more a week.”
While she was searching for her purpose, she lived in Little Rock, then Fayetteville. At one point, she was working three jobs at the same time — as a barista at Starbucks, a swimming coach and a fitness instructor at a gym, “and none required an MBA,” she said.
“I was working all the time. I’d leave at 5 a.m. and get home at 8 p.m.,” Ellis said.
Her parents were living in Dallas, and her father had met someone who knew of a team that was meeting in Fayetteville to go to Ireland. Her father passed along her phone number, and she ended up being contacted by a family in Fayetteville and attended a meeting.
“Honestly, I had no interest to go be a missionary in Ireland. I met with them, and the timing of it all seemed to line up. I’m really careful how I talk about calling, especially in a spiritual context,” she said, “because it can be used as an excuse … just to just sit and do nothing because we’re waiting to be called.
“I don’t want to say I was ‘called’ to Ireland, but the opportunity presented itself, and I was available and willing,” she said.
“I think the biggest thing was realizing that life in another country is still just life,” Ellis said. “You still have to get up, take a shower and feed yourself. All the annoying things you have to do don’t go away because you move to a different country.”
The experience changed her idea about creativity and the impact it can have on self-esteem and relationships, she said.
“One of the things we were involved in was a youth camp in Northern Ireland,” Ellis said. “We lived in Dublin; Northern Ireland is where the majority of problems are between Protestants and Catholics.”
The camp, started 50 years ago, aims for restoration by bringing students from different backgrounds together, Ellis said.
“The second year I was there, I was given the challenging girls in my tent. The year before, one had shaved another one’s eyebrow off while she was sleeping.”
Both those girls were in Ellis’ tent, and their relationship was up and down, she said.
After the seven-day camp, “I made it through with both my eyebrows,” she said, laughing.
At the end of camp, one of the girls asked Ellis if she would be her counselor the next year.
“When I said, ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Really? Because nobody ever wants us,’” Ellis said.
Three of the girls also asked if they could come stay with Ellis in Dublin, and Ellis said they could.
“It’s a five-hour train ride, so I didn’t think they would come,” she said. “They stayed with me for nine days. While they were with me, I was just trying to think of things to keep them busy.”
One craft project was making pillow covers with various strips of fabric.
“They were overwhelmed with fabric choices … didn’t know how to use a sewing machine … and went through the process of simple steps to sew a straight line and having to start over,” Ellis said.
It took about eight hours to finish the project, and she took photos of their completed pillow covers and posted them on social media.
“That night, we spent the entire evening reading through their comments and all the likes,” Ellis said. “They went from ‘no one ever wants us’ to their realization that they had made something that people thought was cool and that people saw value in. Some of that value was getting reflected back on them.
“That was the first time I realized the impact creativity can have on our hearts, on a deeper level.”
Ellis said it’s a myth that some people aren’t creative.
“Creativity is one of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. Coming from a Christian world view, I think creativity is the most basic way we have God’s image in us,” she said. “I’d always enjoyed doing creative things. I’m not calling myself an artist.”
Ellis wanted to expand that use of creativity to inspire others and create relationships. She had a hard time naming her business, she said.
“It was one of the first obstacles that stopped me in my tracks for a few months,” she said.
Ellis said she wrote down words associated with creativity, “with the idea that it’s not just for ourselves; it blesses other people. It’s not just teaching somebody to sew, but teaching a sewing class to teach us how to be around each other,” she said.
“’Make’ was on the list. … ‘Do’ was on there somewhere,” she said, and Make.Do was born.
Her logo is a lemon, and it brings to mind making lemonade out of lemons, she said.
“The act implies offering a glass or setting up a stand and selling it. Lemonade brings with it that impression of community. It’s really been a perfect name and image,” she said. Ellis also uses a “big pitcher” to represent filling it up and pouring it out into the community.
In addition to the public classes, Ellis said, she looks for ways to partner with local organizations that support the community.
This summer, she organized Camp Createfull. She invited teenage girls who are in foster care and those who have suffered abuse and were clients at the Child Safety Center of White County.
I worked with a licensed therapist to develop a curriculum that combines different creative activities with personal reflection and group discussion,” she said.
The eight teenagers stayed at Harding University and spent three days in creative projects at Make.Do, which included painting in Searcy’s Art Alley and learning how to do hand-embroidery.
“We used creativity to bring out identity, value and purpose and get them to begin to trust themselves,” she said.
One of her goals as Make.Do grows, Ellis said, is to focus more on programs such as Camp Createfull.
She said that in the past year, she has seen “a big change in people getting involved in what [Make.Do is] doing and getting excited about things our town is offering,” she said.
Searcy’s win in the Small Business Revolution-Main Street competition is “just a huge compliment to Searcy and all the work and energy we’re already putting into making Searcy a cool place,” she said.
Ellis created her niche and wants to help others find their own.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-5671 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.