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 BC will do that by handing you a front-row seat to some of the worst moments of strangers’ lives. It asks of you, that every shift, to show up composed and calm.

She’s still showing up on the road today but these days, she’s found another way to show up too, off the clock.

When she’s not on shift, Jess splits her time with Simon Fraser University, where she’s taking coursework in trauma prevention and recovery, a next chapter built on the same foundation that got her into paramedicine in the first place: if someone’s unwell or needing assistance, I want to be useful. But anyone who’s worked front-line emergency 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, but that starts costing you more than it gives?

For Jess, part of the answer came from 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 watched 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 Team Rubicon Canada found Jess through her work on Instagram they reached out. Here was an organization built by and for people who’d spent their working lives in service — first responders, veterans (and kick-ass civilians)— and who needed to continue to serve when the old uniform came off. Team Rubicon Canada doesn’t believe there is a reason to stop being useful, and Jess saw this as an opportunity to give in a new way.

This spring, Jess turned that belief into building two Team Rubicon Canada–themed quilts, hand-designed and hand-stitched, and donated them to be auctioned at the Salute to Service event in Vancouver this November. One was built around Team Rubicon’s Campfires — those quiet, informal gatherings behind the scenes of disaster response, 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 Canada.

Both quilts will be auctioned at the Gala, and the dollars they raise will matter, but for Jess, the point is larger. “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 studying trauma recovery, or why she decided to step into the arena and become a Greyshirt.

Jess is building something else now too: a small quilting business of her own, JJ.Handmade, where her art can been seen, and the patterns she designs and sells help support mental health and rehabilitation resources for people in uniform. It’s early, but it’s another way the same thread runs through everything she does — use what you’re good at and direct it at something that matters.

Team Rubicon Canada was built for people like Jess: people whose working lives are built around service, who don’t stop serving just because they’ve found a new way to do it. For some Greyshirts, that means deploying to the next disaster. For Jess, right now, it means a needle, a pattern, and the auction table in Vancouver — proof that there’s more than one way to answer the call to serve others.