When Aveda Artist and hair color specialist Jordyn Shipley learned that the limited-edition Light the Way candle featured an aroma of Haitian vetiver, she was pleasantly surprised. ”I thought, ‘That’s amazing!’” she said via phone. It felt like perfect timing — you see, Jordyn had just returned from a weeklong trip to Gressier, Haiti, where she volunteered alongside her grandmother with Team Iowa Missions.

“I love celebrating Earth Month with Aveda every year, but this year hit closer to my heart than before. My grandmother has been going [to Haiti] twice a year for the past eight years,” Jordyn said. “It has been on my to-do list for the last year, so I said this would be the year I’d go.”

Jordyn spent a week in Haiti in February, helping with projects including building beds for the families they worked with, boxing up food for elderly community members, playing with children, and giving families solar lights for their homes.

“I wanted to make sure that my intentions were set straight beforehand and to make sure this was a trip about other people and not about making myself look good, so I checked in and thought, ‘What will I be able to do?’ What I was able to do was be a set of helping hands,” Jordyn said.

Her Aveda training came in handy during the trip. Jordyn spent time giving the gift of touch, something all Aveda Artists are trained in and provide to their guests. “I provided hand massages and mini-manicures for the women who work in the house we stayed in,” she explained. She also met a special six-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and witnessed first-hand how powerful touch can be. “I did a hand massage on her and she got so relaxed – usually if you’d touch her, she’d tense up. But her eyes got droopy and she was really relaxed. We encouraged her mom to massage her arms and legs when she could to help her relax.”