Reverend Joyce Blair Buekers graduated from Claremont School of Theology and was ordained in Phoenix at the Church of the Beatitudes in 1998 after a successful marketing career with the IBM Corporation.   Joyce’s second career in healthcare ministry was inspired by her experience as an Integrative Therapies Coordinator and Chaplain and Pastoral Counselor with Hospice of the Valley (HOV).

 

Joyce founded the Therapeutic Harp Foundation (THF) in 2000.  THF’s  mission is to provide therapeutic harp music to enhance the quality of life for the patients, their families and especially terminally ill hospice patients while they transition. Over the years the non-profit charity has greatly expanded throughout the Valley and Arizona serving 29 healthcare institutions, over 130,000 patients, staff and volunteers in 2017 and has engaged over 50 harpists since its inception. (www.therapeuticharp.org)

 

Joyce’s passion to clinically prove the efficacy of the spiritual side of Healthcare has led her to pursue her Doctorate in Integrative Therapies with an emphasis on the Electromagnetic Brain at Creative Living University.   Her studies demonstrate that we have the power to heal from within.  The model of “Living Medicine” and Joyce’s passion for holistic medicine is to enhance life itself through the use of spiritual disciplines like therapeutic harp, meditation and spiritual mind treatment.

 

Having been born into a General Electric family, Joyce’s father moved from Schenectady, New York, to Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco and then finally settled his family in Phoenix when he took over as Branch Manager for Computer Timesharing in the 60s.  He encouraged Joyce to start in the pioneering field of computers at Central High School where her two sisters and Joyce played the harp for the orchestra.  Joyce’s grandmother was the first woman in the Los Angeles Philharmonic and played with Walt Disney Studios for over 40 years (including the harp in Fantasia). There are 4 generations of harpists in Joyce’s family.

 

Joyce loves the fact that she married her childhood sweetheart, Michael Powers Buekers, in 1976.  Their two children Carly Rebuck and Michael Blair Buekers are 4th generation Phoenicians.  They are thrilled to have a new grandbaby Wilder James Buekers added this past year---a 5th generation!