[2][3] Lincoln Alden Colcord delivered his daughter Joanna on board his sailing ship, the Charlotte A. Littlefield, in the southwest Pacific near New Caledonia.

[3] Jane Colcord tutored her children at sea,[2] and Joanna's high school education was by correspondence course.

She would recall later that in addition to these subjects, she also learned concepts such as racial equality, self-control, orderliness, and a sense of duty.

In 1929 she became the leader of the Charity Organization Division of the Russel Sage Foundation in New York, a position she held until 1945.

She eventually became critical of aspects of the Roosevelt administration’s categorical approach to relief, issues in public provision, as well as in other areas.

In November 1950, she married longtime friend and colleague Frank J. Bruno, a professor of applied sociology at Washington University in St. Louis who had become a widower several months before.