Joyce Klimek serves Reef Without Borders as Senior Advisor, Community Engagement & Conflict Resolution, lending decades of leadership and mediation experience to an organization built on bringing people together for reef restoration.

Joyce holds a Master of Science in Sociology and Psychology, with substantial graduate-level work in Anthropology, and completed two years of clinical supervision toward mental health therapist licensing in Iowa and Nebraska. Her career spans executive directorships at Integrative Health Services in Iowa County, the Catherine McAuley Center for Women in Cedar Rapids, and University Year for Action in Green Bay, Wisconsin, alongside professorships at Kirkwood Community College, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and Iowa State University. She has also served as a school psychologist for Washington, D.C. Public Schools and as a social researcher for the RAND Corporation, including fieldwork on migration patterns in Hyderabad, India.

A trained mediator, Joyce coordinated family mediation for the Community Dispute Settlement Center in Cedar Rapids, addressed the 1987 Iowa Judges Conference on mediation in domestic court, and organized her own statewide conference on the subject. Her volunteer record is just as expansive, from founding a parents' coalition against substance abuse to representing Iowa on the National Child Support Advocacy Coalition.

Raised on a farm in rural Iowa, Joyce brings real-world grit to match her academic credentials: she edited a small-town newspaper, was the first woman in Illinois to work as a road maintenance worker, and once ran a family hog-buying and livestock-trucking business. That combination of grounded, hands-on experience and high-level strategic insight is exactly what she brings to Reef Without Borders.