Jo Heaven founded Empower, a charity supporting various community projects in The Gambia. Empower has just had a big cash injection thanks to Jo buying a 99p print which was being thrown out by a charity shop, but which sold for £4,200 at auction. Jo, 52, is also business development manager at Swindon Women’s Aid. She lives in Kingshill and is married to Ben, a design and testing electrician. They have two children

JO HEAVEN’S favourite fable is an old one about a person walking along a beach on which tens of thousands of starfish have been washed up.

Without water they will die, so the person begins throwing them back.

Another person approaches and asks: “With so many starfish on the beach, what difference can you hope to make?”

The first person throws another starfish back into the waves and replies: “Well, I made a difference to that one.”

Jo founded Empower after visiting The Gambia with Swindon College students during her time as head of the travel and tourism department.

“As soon as I was out there I realised I knew people who could really help – teachers, nurses, vets, those sorts of people," she says.

“We started doing team trips out and set up Empower just to get some money to help some people, and that was it, really.

“I’d do car boot sales, very small stuff really, and then people would donate things I could take out as luggage.”

Empower’s name reflects its philosophy. Its aim is to give people the help they need to help themselves, and it does so only after consulting those people.

A typical project helped village birthing assistants, who work in homes without electricity.

“These are older women in the village who help deliver babies.

“What we’ve done to empower them is to give them a mobile phone and a solar lamp. That means they can go to the huts at night, put the light on and deliver babies.

“If they’ve got a problem, then rather than having to find a man who’s got a phone and some credit, they can ring up and say to the hospital, ‘Can you get an ambulance out to us?’

“Mobile phones get donated and a solar lamp costs £3.50. That changes lives. That saves lives.

“Every fundraising event we do, I know exactly where that money is going to go.

“All my time is volunteered and everybody who goes on a trip pays for themselves.

“It’s grown. What we started off with was a lot of trainers, and now where we have Gambian trainers we have a programme.“ Other projects have ranged from equipping schools with solar lights to teaching organic gardening techniques.

Jo was born in Port Stanley in the Falkland islands, the only child of British emigres.

Her mother was a secretary with the Falklands Islands Company and her father worked for The British Antarctic Survey.

When Jo was two the family moved to Nigeria for a couple of years. After her parents split, Jo and her mother relocated to Devon.

After A-levels, Jo went to work at Sainsbury’s as a trainee manager, then left to become a secretary at a transport firm.

Later she studied for a degree in International Transport in Cardiff, graduating in 1988.

By that time, she was married, having met her Swindonian husband at Glastonbury Festival.

The couple settled in Swindon, where Jo became an account manager with a marketing firm. Later they moved to Devon, and at one point ran a pub.

There was a remarkable array of life experiences. Jo simultaneously ran her own market research company and worked as a regional manager for a distribution firm.

She was a marketing manager for a chain of travel agencies. When the 9/11 atrocity damaged the business, she found herself working in a call centre, rising from sales floor novice to top seller.

Jo and her husband split up, only to remarry in 2001, by which time Jo had found the Christian faith which remains to this day and she served as a Swindon Street Pastor for seven years.

“I loved that,” she says, “being out there, helping people.

"So many miracles I’ve seen – chance meetings with people who were about to commit suicide and we happened to come and talk to them.

“There were girls who were so vulnerable you feared what would have happened to them, people who were unconscious on the benches and people circling around them.

“You knew they were going to get mugged but we turned up at the right time.”

Needing a job in Swindon after returning here, Jo became a part time travel and tourism lecturer, only to find herself promoted to the role of department head a few months later.

She was to remain at Swindon College for 11 and a half years until redundancy, spending the last four as student experience manager, later being appointed business development manager at Swindon Women’s Aid.

The latest extraordinary thing to happen to her was buying what turned out to be a valuable piece of art for 99p at the Barnardo’s clearance centre in Cavendish Square.

Jo thought it might look nice in her spare room, but then happened to glance at the signatures on the back.

Of the money raised, 90 per cent will create the Empower reserve needed for Charity Commission registration, which will in turn be the gateway to more potential grant aid than ever before.

The remainder will be gifted to Barnardo’s, meaning an item once set to be thrown away will net the children’s charity a few hundred pounds.

The thought of keeping a single penny for herself never occurred to Jo.

“I haven’t earned this money. I haven’t slogged for it,” she said.

“It was, as far as I’m concerned, divine providence that I got it, and therefore my benefit to me will be that I’ve got peace of mind – that my charity will be Charity Commission registered, and that we can now get bigger grants to do more projects.”

Information about Empower can be found at the EmpowertheGambia and Hoolelotofretro Facebook pages.