A couple of times a year, Joice Truban Curry packs her bags for a week or 10 days and heads for Sandolo Resorts in the Caribbean. Sometimes her husband of seven years, Sean, whom she met in a grocery store 13 years ago, accompanies her. It’s work for Curry. Well, she gets paid for it.

Curry is one of two aerobic instructors from California hired by the Sandolo Resorts. The rest of the time, she works as president/CEO of c3 Communications Inc., the public relations business she started three years ago.

“I worked at a number of fabulous places,” says Curry, “and I always wanted to start my own firm.” She has what she calls a “virtual office,” working out of her home. She has one full-time employee and a team of experts she contracts with as necessary.

C3 Communications was behind the highly publicized Operation Thin Mint campaign of the Girl Scout Council of San Diego-Imperial Counties to send cookies to those in the military in the Middle East. Curry received the Silver Anvil award, the most prestigious national public relations honor, for that campaign.

“It was amazing to be in New York with all those big name household companies,” Curry says of the ceremony when she received the award.

Curry, at 30, is the youngest president of the San Diego Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America in the chapter’s history. She serves on the board of Starlight Theatre and is a volunteer public information officer for the American Red Cross. Providing community service is important to Curry, so her firm dedicates 10 percent of its billings for pro bono for work for nonprofit organizations.

Curry stays in good physical shape herself as a part-time fitness instructor at the La Jolla YMCA, where she has been a teacher for 10 years.

— Sandy Pasqua