Profile of Sam Davis & Aimee Joyaux
A small arts nonprofit in Virginia benefits from the expertise of two skilled volunteers with extensive community-service experience
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
Published on January 26, 2025
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Sam Davis and Aimee Joyaux have polar opposite fields of expertise, yet they share certain strong social beliefs that have led them down a path of helping underserved communities for years.
Davis is a highly-skilled strategic thinker, a longtime business consultant with an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
Joyaux is a lifelong artist with a love of painting and printing and an MFA in photography from the University of Oregon.
Yet both have a decades-long passion for social justice and are experienced practical altruists in the nonprofit world, now applying their long-developed career skills as two of the approximate 40 volunteers at the Lamb Center for the Arts and Healing (Lamb Arts).
Lamb Arts is a small, but bold and audacious nonprofit in Hopewell, Virginia, focused on offering the arts as a means for students and the community to creatively face the challenges faced by their economically depressed city.
Not surprising, it’s led by a highly-motivated and inspiring individual from the area.
The organization and its leader
Lamb Arts founder Eliza Lamb grew up in Hopewell, then left to get an education. She’s a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and has four graduate degrees from Columbia University: Three masters’ degrees - in clinical psychology, arts administration and art + art education - and an EdD in the latter. Dr. Lamb worked for 15 years as an arts educator in such diverse environments as Guatemalan orphanages, the Ivy Leagues at Columbia, and as curator at the Children’s Museum of Arts in New York City. Then, after some internal debate about whether to become a professor or work in the art world in New York City, she had an awakening, or an epiphany, after spending a year in deep soul-searching.
“I would drop my daughter off at school and go sit on my knees at the local church for an hour every morning. I would ask God to show me why he put me here,” Dr. Lamb said. “I would pray: ‘My hands are empty, show me what you made them for? What do you want me to do?’ I did that for a year and it was intense and humbling and scary. But also growing.
“It became very clear to me what I was supposed to do. That I was supposed to come back to Hopewell, and that I was supposed to use my skills to impact change.”
Her father, Charles Lamb, a successful Hopewell-area businessman, had similar civic ideals and offered financial support. So, in September 2016, Dr. Lamb and her daughter, Maddie, and husband, artist Federico Infante, packed up and moved from New York to Hopewell, a mostly rural community of 23,000, about 23 miles southeast of Richmond. The city, one of the poorest in Virginia, has a poverty rate of more than 20 percent, about double the national average. Dr. Lamb knew the city needed help to revitalize.
“My goals were to try to give a voice to this community that felt that its voice had been taken from it,” she said. “To try to give hope to a community that many thought of as hopeless.”
Dr. Lamb said there was no funding for art programs in town and no offerings for students after school or for adults any time.
Lamb Arts opened in October 2016 with the goal of helping the community with accessible, high-quality arts programming and mind, body, spirit healing opportunities, and to give Hopewell a sense of community through artistic expression.
To accomplish that goal, with her one employee and dozens of volunteers, Dr. Lamb now offers expansive programming.
It ranges from creating and hosting the annual Lamb Arts Fest, which draws more than 1,000 people to downtown, to art classes for seniors in nursing homes, for children in schools and libraries, and for teens, as part of leadership training program.
Community builders include One City One Hope, an art collaboration between Lamb Arts and local spiritual centers; pop-up art programs to engage the community; Valentine’s Day card making, so community members can send cards to seniors; and local artist collaborations, such as the Button Project, where local artists create buttons that sell for 50 cents around town, and the Billboard Project, where seven local artists created community-centered art for donated billboards in Hopewell.
“It’s very common for someone from Hopewell to say I’m from Hopewell, it’s the worst place on earth,” she said. Her goal is to reverse that through the world of art, by creating it, by thinking about it, and by collaborating on it.
She said Davis and Joyaux are two of her most valuable volunteers because they are experts in their fields, and, therefore, don’t need supervision.
“I don’t have to manage or train them, like I do with most volunteers,” she said, “and they understand what Lamb Arts is all about.”
A non-artist who brings order, discipline and years of experience helping nonprofits solve problems
For more than 25 years, Sam Davis, now 79, served as a business consultant focusing on family-owned businesses primarily on the East Coast, from Boston to Atlanta. Working from his base in Richmond, Davis specialized in helping family businesses with generational transitions, including management and operations issues that often were complicated by family dynamics.
“Sometimes I was part business consultant and part counselor,” Davis explained.
In one case that stood out, he said, he was hired by a family that was in dispute as their large family business was transitioning from the founding father to the daughter, with salary, ownership, spousal employment and revenue goals all in dispute.
“It was really a conflict resolution situation,” he said.
But Davis was much more than just a business consultant. He was (and still is) a social activist. He’s used his business skills to serve on a dozen nonprofit boards.
He explained his motive: “I believe that nonprofits are an essential component of the U.S. social and economic system, providing services to communities that our government no longer does.”
This desire to help others stems from Davis following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights ministry in the 1960s.
Dr. King “changed my worldview,” he said. In the 1970s, Davis attended the Episcopal Divinity School (now part of the Union Theological Seminary) in New York City and earned a masters degree in theological studies. He had intended to become a civil rights priest, but changed paths and entered the business world.
Throughout his career, Davis has sought to help others by applying the skills he honed in his day job.
The nonprofit boards on which he has served include three Richmond-based organizations: Better Housing Corporation, which renovates and builds affordable housing units for low-income residents; Housing Opportunities Made Equal, which monitors and enforces fair housing laws in central Virginia; and Shalom Farms, which provides its fresh produce to food banks and to communities located in so-called “food deserts.”
Fast forward to 2017 and Dr. Lamb needed help with business advice, fundraising and board development for Lamb Arts. She was introduced to Davis, who had previously served on an art nonprofit in Richmond. It was a good match.
“My son and daughter-in-law are artists in Brooklyn, so I am a devotee of the arts,” he said, adding that he understood and appreciated Dr. Lamb’s “vision and passion.”
He began as a pro bono business consultant for Lamb Arts and then joined the board in 2019.
“He was able to come in and really focus on helping us formalize the board recruitment system,” Dr. Lamb explained. “To strategically think about who we were looking for, what type of skills we were looking for. And then brainstorming about who those people could be and then also making connections. Sam is a great connector of people. And then helping us think through the fundraising planning.”
From Davis’ point of view, it was helping Dr. Lamb “think through the multi-year strategic business plan and what the budget is going to look like, including what resources will be required and where the funds will come from to provide those resources.”
He said he impressed upon Dr. Lamb that Lamb Arts needed to obtain grants, find individual donors, develop an income stream, and diversify its fundraising and board membership by expanding well beyond her family. Otherwise, Davis feared, the organization’s growth was not sustainable.
As Lamb Arts has expanded its artistic offerings for the community over the last seven-plus years, the revenue has grown from $86,000 to about $300,000 and its board of directors has increased in size from five to eight members, with diverse skill sets, with six of those members being new, including Davis.
Dr. Lamb said Davis was “instrumental in helping us grow our budget,” while at the same time helping Lamb Arts “professionalize” its organization by focusing on best practices.
Davis, as a board member and advisor and now as board treasurer, helped Dr. Lamb realize she needed to hire a program director.
“Eliza is one of the best nonprofit executives I’ve seen,” he said, “but she can’t do everything herself.”
He also advised Dr. Lamb to apply for and enroll in a nonprofit leadership training program in Richmond, which, he said, has increased her knowledge base and connected her to other community leaders. This has led to one foundation leader initiating a grant to Lamb Arts.
Dr. Lamb said his advice and prodding is invaluable.
“He knows a lot about what other nonprofits have done. He’s always a person I can call and say, ‘What am I supposed to do about this?’ or something like, ‘How do I even find a new accountant?’ And if he doesn’t know the answer, he will find somebody who does.”
For the future, Davis said he will focus on assisting Dr. Lamb with continuing to expand and diversify the board, inviting members with a diverse skill set, and recruiting major donors.
Dr. Lamb said she hopes Lamb Arts has a seven-figure annual budget in five years.
From the business side to the creative, enter Aimee Joyaux, stage left.
A skilled artist imparts her passion and skill on others
While growing up in Hawaii, Aimee Joyaux discovered painting as a senior in high school.
“I just fell in love with it immediately,” she said. “I felt like I found a language and I was so excited by it I chose art as a degree path.” She studied drawing and painting at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Oregon, then took almost a decade detour to the ski slopes of Oregon, New Mexico, Washington and Argentina.
“I was surely inspired by the beauty of the mountains,” Joyaux said, explaining a connection between her skiing and her love of art. “The weather, the sense of solitude. I loved it most when it was storming and I was all bundled up and could just be out in that wind and the whiteness. That stark beauty, coupled with the rhythm of skiing, the shapes of the turns, the choreography of the sport and the way the weather shaped the landscape, including the trees.”
The love of shapes and colors and all things creative motivated Joyaux to return to school. Soon after earning her MFA, she was hired as a professor teaching photography, drawing, design, bookmaking and women’s art history at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. After eight years at the university, in 2000, she and her husband, Alain Joyaux, moved to Petersburg, Virginia, south of Richmond, where they bought an old cotton warehouse and converted it into a home and art studio.
Through the years, Joyaux, now 64, has become an accomplished artist with an impressive portfolio of work that includes colorful abstract paintings and stark black and white photographic projects. Her work has been exhibited at shows in New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C., among other places.
“My work is grounded in a visceral response to current events, be they personal, political, cultural or imagined,” she writes on her website, aimeejoyaux.com.
Her paintings are often a collage of unique geometric shapes, in bright pink, orange, yellow, green and red, with black tossed in, abstract figures juxtaposed, overlapping, almost dancing, like the vast and diverse populace in our world, the different shapes, sizes, types and colors trying to coexist, trying to survive amidst the complexities and conflicts all around us.
“The world is heating up,” she writes on her website. “These works on canvas explore an exaggerated visual response to the combative and imposing rhetoric blasting from all sides.”
She said her mother instilled in her the desire to do volunteer work and her CV, dating from 1987, includes 11 community service projects, not including Lamb Arts, that she’s been involved in.
These projects include her working as a ski guide for the visually impaired, and her current service on the board of two Richmond nonprofits: Milk River Arts, which pairs artist mentors with artists who have disabilities, and Studio Two Three, a 24/7 community arts space that has a mission to “empower artists to make art & make change.”
Joyaux’s desire to be creative and help others see the relevance and importance of art led her to teaching graphic design, photography and art history at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s High School in Petersburg, and then she became director of education, then interim director, at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond (VisArts).
She said her work at VisArts was the best preparation for her work at Lamb Arts.
“That work prepared me best to understand how community art activities and opportunities can foster growth, confidence and autonomy in young people,” she said. “They had programming similar to what Eliza is doing, such as working with seniors, school-age kids and teen mentoring. I see the impact of these programs as they are happening and also the long-term effects. It’s very impressive.”
She was introduced to Dr. Lamb by a mutual friend.
“So I called her and we had lunch. I was so impressed by her,” she said. “I mean, she is something else, that Eliza Lamb. She’s just a Phoenix who has taken a whole bunch of people with her as she rises.”
Dr. Lamb called Joyaux a “well-respected and seasoned art educator who I trust and rely on.”
So, for more than five years now, Joyaux has been a volunteer art instructor for Lamb Arts, focusing on helping with the annual Lamb Arts Festival, where Joyaux demonstrates the art of poster making with her printing press. She also teaches art classes in her studio for local high school and college students. These classes are part of a leadership training program Dr. Lamb devised, with Joyaux instructing on printing, paper design and poster creation to engage the students and get them to think about what they were creating through the program.
Joyaux says these programs are much more than just about creating art.
“During multiple sessions we build a relationship, which allows some time for reflection and confidence building,” she said. “We have a lot of fun in the beginning, but in the end, we can dig a little deeper into what’s going on, reflecting on the art and what it all means.”
She’s learned to appreciate teens and how they approach art, because they’re looser, risk takers, less afraid to make a mistake than younger children or adults.
“They’re more willing to be vulnerable and make something bad or just experiment. They recognize that art is about expression. And Eliza’s kids are the best kids I’ve ever worked with. They’re very studious and industrious. They work well as teams…. I said, ‘Let’s go, go, go, go, go, make as much art as we can.’ And they were there for it.”
She cited one teenage girl as an example of how art can be a powerful tool.
She didn’t show much interest in the activities until she “came alive” in the print shop, Joyaux said. “She got excited about choosing paper to print on, she was gracious in assisting her peers using the press and she was proud of the work she made. To see a kid go from kind of stoic and standoffish to this is golden.”
“I believe that art has the power to change the world or art has the power to change an individual or it’s a meditation. It’s just an activity that’s valuable to our souls. So if I can share that excitement and enthusiasm and the materials with somebody a little bit and show them how to do something. Then I see the reward on their face. That’s really cool.”
Joyaux makes the best case for practical altruism by saying this:
“Well, it’s just really rewarding, because I don’t have to go learn something new, like how to use Excel. I already know something really well. And to have somebody recognize that you are really good at this ... that’s super rewarding and validating. And it takes a lot of pressure off too, because I don’t have to fix the budget. I don’t have to volunteer 1,000 hours. Or stand out in the rain handing out pamphlets. I can do something I love and something that I’m good at and something I really believe in - art.”
(If you wish to learn more about Lamb Arts and see the gorgeous art on its home page, pleasse visit their website: https://www.lambarts.org/)