Carroll Jacobs is the newest administrative staff person at The World Methodist Council. She resides in Cape Town, South Africa, the largest city in the Western Cape Province, and the second most populated city in South Africa.
Carroll was raised in a mixed-denominational home, her mother being Anglican and her father being from a Congregational Church background. At the age of eight, she made a commitment to follow Jesus after a teacher gave an altar call at the government primary school she attended. At a young age, she remembers her family moving due to the Group Areas Act instituted and maintained by the Apartheid Government in South Africa, and recalls how the grief of losing various family members due to illness and accident shaped her faith and her life-outlook.
Carroll has worked in administration for several Church-related institutions including the almost 150 year old Inanda Seminary in Kwa Zulu Natal Province [a mission school of The United Church Board for World (now Global) Ministries (Congregational) in New York]; The Methodist Church of Southern Afric, including the Order of Christian Service, a lay order of the MCSA; and St. Luke’s Hospice. She was instrumental in the development of the Western Cape AIDS Training, Information and Counselling Centre (ATICC) under the Department of Health, Western Cape Government, a provincial department of the Department of National Health. Concerned that there were no interventions for children affected by, or infected with HIV and AIDS, from birth or abuse, she introduced Sand Tray play for children in 1997, and has recently commenced study in Jungian Sand Play Therapy. Carroll managed ATICC for 17 of the 25 ½ years that she worked there, and retired with ATICC having trained 46,295 professional and non-professional health care providers. She now joins the WMC team providing administrative assistance to the General Secretary in Cape Town, and the office in North Carolina.
Carroll lives with and cares for her 90 year-old mother. She enjoys recreational reading, painting, writing children’s stories, making African beaded jewelry and practicing her guitar lessons.
