Stitched In: Jess Quilts for Something Bigger

Jess Jerome has spent her young career answering calls most people spend their lives hoping never to make. Four years as a paramedic in the Yukon and BC will do that by handing you a front-row seat to some of the worst moments of strangers’ lives, and it asks of you, that every shift, to show up composed and calm.

She’s still showing up too in another way, just not in an ambulance.

These days Jess splits her time between being on the road and Simon Fraser University, where she’s taking coursework in trauma prevention and recovery, a next chapter built on the same instinct that got her into paramedicine in the first place: if someone’s hurting or needing assistance, I want to be useful. But anyone who’s worked front-line service long enough knows the question that eventually finds you: what happens when the body or Father Time says it’s time to step back from the calls themselves? What’s Plan B when the thing you’re good at is showing up for people, and showing up starts costing you more than it gives?

For Jess, part of the answer arrived on her grandmother’s sewing table.

Her grandmother was a quilter who could turn a stack of fabric into something beautiful that told a story. Jess grew up watching her build quilts and when Jess picked up a needle herself, she wasn’t just learning a craft. She was learning her grandmother’s way of sharing something important.

So when Jess found Team Rubicon Canada, something clicked. Here was an organization built by and for people who’d spent their working lives in service — first responders and veterans — and who needed somewhere to put that instinct to use when the old uniform came off. Team Rubicon Canada doesn’t believe there is a reason to stop being useful, and Jess saw this a way for to give in a new way.

This spring, Jess turned that belief into her craft, building two Team Rubicon Canada–themed quilts, hand-designed and hand-stitched, and donated them to be auctioned at the Salute to Service Gala in Toronto this past May. One was built around Team Rubicon’s Campfires — those informal, unglamorous gatherings where Greyshirts sit down together after the hard days and just share. Jess pieced the quilt, working fabric into a pattern meant to hold the same thing a real campfire holds: warmth, and room for everyone who’s earned a seat in it. The second represents Team Rubicon.

Both quilts sold at the Gala. The dollars mattered, but for Jess, the point was bigger than the auction paddle. “Quilting is how I give back to something bigger than myself,” she says of the work — a sentence that could just as easily describe why she became a paramedic, or why she’s back in a classroom studying trauma recovery, or why she raised her hand to become a Greyshirt in the first place.

Jess is building something else now too: a small quilting business of her own, with original patterns she designs and sells. It’s early, but it’s another way the same thread runs through everything she does — use what you’re good at, point it at something that matters, and don’t wait for permission to start.

Team Rubicon Canada was built for people like Jess: people whose working lives were organized around service, who aren’t done serving just because the job title changed. For some Greyshirts, that means deploying to the next disaster. For Jess, right now, it means a needle, a pattern, and a gala auction table in Toronto — proof that there’s more than one way to answer the call.

Jess is a Greyshirt, and she’s just getting started.