Joy Jacobs merges divergent passions for real estate and anti-racism in a life of many chapters.

That Joy Jacobs exudes joy may be incidental. That she is named for a feeling of happiness is by design.

She was adopted and raised in Long Island, New York, by a Holocaust survivor father and a mother who was unable to conceive. “He had seen his family get killed in Austria, and he had this burning desire – he wanted to have as many babies as he could,” Jacobs says. When they adopted her, relatively old as first-time parents, they named her Joy because they were overjoyed to be parents.

But that “burning desire” for biological children never faded, and ultimately it changed Jacobs’ life trajectory. First, the family moved to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where Jacobs was one of the few white children on a mostly-Black island. Eventually her father remarried and started another family, and Jacobs and her mother moved to California. She finished high school then college in San Jose, and became a nurse. And while there were more twists and turns, she ended up staying in California forever.

Jacobs and her late husband raised a family and in 1989 moved to Monterey, where Jacobs made a switch to real estate 28 years ago. Now she’s taken on a volunteer project helping her partner, Dirrick Williams, manage the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative (BLAAC), of which Jacobs serves as treasurer.

Weekly: New York to St. Thomas to San Jose to Monterey – you lived in a lot of places, but stayed here forever once you arrived. What brought you to Monterey?

Jacobs: I had a boat in the harbor, and I loved that boat. So we moved the kids here, and the rest is history.

Do you still have a boat?

We just got rid of a boat eight months ago, and I’m thinking about how to make a new boat come into my life. I just love to be on the water, it’s like home. And I love to fish – if it’s too bumpy for codfish, we go inside for sand dabs.

I want to talk about your career change from nursing to real estate. Why?

A bad lawsuit ruined my husband’s [an attorney] reputation. He looked at me and said, “You are going to have to find something you can do to make a lot more money, because my reputation’s shot.” Real estate was something I always wanted to try.

It seems quite a departure from health care.

As I look back now, real estate and nursing are very similar. It’s the same hand-holding, the same kind of attention and laser-focus that you need – whether it’s somebody’s health, which is very important, or their money, because this is the biggest investment of their life. It seemed like a natural move to me.

I think one reason I’ve been successful [at real estate] is because of nursing – the whole triage thing, “let’s see what’s wrong, how can I help you fix it,” whether your bone is broken or your bank is broken.

You work with your daughter, Jen, as the Jacobs Team. What’s it like working as a mother-daughter pair?

I couldn’t ask for a better business partner. She’s so much like me, we just finish each other’s sentences. In the beginning I would tell her what I thought she should do, and I could see in her face she heard me say, “Eat your broccoli, clean your room.” There was a little pushback in the beginning, but now it’s just smooth; we’ve worked through all those speed bumps. It’s been 19 years.

You describe basically having two full-time commitments: real estate in the morning, and BLAAC volunteer work in the afternoon.

I wake up naturally at 4:30am, and take care of my real estate business – I make sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. Then come the afternoon, I switch gears.

You have attended every single session of the Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism class offered by BLAAC. Are you still learning?

I grew up on an island where I was the minority. I know some of the pain. I thought I knew it all until I dug in deeper, and I realized that my pain didn’t even come close to what Black people feel, every single day. I thought I knew a lot more than I really did.

I feel like this is the pathway to change – to real, loving, kind change.

You have a pretty intense itinerary. Do you do anything to relax?

Pilates and hot yoga.

Those also sound intense.

I miss my boat like crazy, but it was just too much work.