A daughter of Liberia
Nina was born on July 30, 1984, at ELWA Hospital in Paynesville, Liberia. Her early years in the Buzzi Quarters community were shaped by the warmth of her maternal grandmother, the late Beatrice Gono Ezeagu, and the love of her mother, Georgia Ezeagu, and father, Alaric Tokpa.
She came of age against the backdrop of Liberia's civil war — and what that season planted in her was not bitterness, but its opposite: resilience, determination, a hunger for education, and a lifelong compassion for people in need, especially children. Even as a young girl, Nina stood out — bright, bold, and unafraid to speak.
When war pressed her family across borders, Nina continued her schooling in Ghana at the Buduburam community before returning to Monrovia, where she completed her secondary education at the College of West Africa in 2002. A door had closed on the childhood she knew. Nina walked through the next one.
The scholar
In the United States, Nina built her education brick by brick: Delaware County Community College, then Temple University — a Bachelor of Social Work in 2007 and a Master of Social Work in 2008. She served her community through roles in behavioral health and mobile crisis intervention, where colleagues saw what everyone eventually saw in Nina: an exceptional, person-centered heart and a gift for meeting people in their worst moments.
They told her to go further. She did. In 2018, Nina began her doctoral journey at Immaculata University — already carrying health challenges, and refusing to let them write her story. She earned a prestigious scholarship, researched cognitive behavioral therapy for war trauma — healing the very wounds her homeland knew — trained in advanced clinical therapies, and completed over 500 psychotherapy hours in her internship year at Rowan University's Counseling Center.
She defended her dissertation and graduated with a 3.95 GPA. The little girl from Buzzi Quarters was now Dr. Nina Ja'asiel Collins.
Wife, mother, minister
In April 2013, Nina married Moretti Collins — her childhood friend from their SOS Children's Village School days in Liberia. Together they built a family blessed with two daughters, Ruby and Sky, who were her pride and joy. Nina was hands-on and fully present — school events, family gatherings, holidays — she loved bringing people together, even while quietly carrying her own battles, so that others could shine.
Her faith was not a compartment of her life; it was the whole house. Nina served Liberia's first online radio station, Radio LIB, as host of the Jesus Affairs show, sharing the gospel across the Liberian community worldwide. She founded Prayer Wives, a women's prayer ministry. In 2010 and 2011, her devotion to her homeland carried her on missions to Liberia and Kenya, where Co-Heirs and Evangelists in Service (CHEIS) was born — a ministry still operating in Monrovia today.
The battle, and the promise
Nina fought colon cancer the way she did everything — with courage, with scholarship, with worship, and without surrendering her purpose. Through treatment she kept studying, kept mothering, kept ministering, kept believing. She finished her doctorate in the middle of the fight. She never stopped pouring into others, even while her own cup was under attack.
When Nina went home to be with the Lord, she left behind more than grief. She left an assignment. The Dr. Nina Collins Foundation is that assignment — carried now by her husband, her daughters, her family, and everyone who ever felt her light.
Why the foundation exists
Every mission of this foundation is a sentence from Nina's life, continued. The Dr. Nina Collins Reading Room in Liberia exists because education carried a girl from Buzzi Quarters to a doctorate — and she believed every Liberian child deserves that same open door. Nina's Hope Cancer Support Program exists because our family walked the cancer road and knows exactly where families need someone standing beside them.
Her life was summarized by the scripture she loved — Romans 8:38–39 — the promise that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. This foundation is our amen to that promise.