“The challenge that lies before you and all leaders like you is not so much that we look to change others, but to change ourselves, and, together, change our society,” said Sister Mary Scullion, Executive Director and President of Project HOME, during her keynote address on campus as the fall 2017 Nerney Leadership Institute’s Executive in Residence.
A member of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, Sister Mary has been involved in service work and advocacy for people experiencing homelessness and those with mental illness since 1978. Among many of the organizations Sister Mary founded (or co-founded) is Project HOME, which she co-founded with Joan Dawson McConnon in 1989.
Under Sister Mary’s leadership, Project HOME has grown from an emergency winter shelter to a nationally recognized organization that provides supportive housing, employment, education, and health care to enable chronically homeless and low-income persons to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty.
“Today’s resident is most well-known for her work with people who are experiencing homelessness,” said Jeff Gingerich, PhD, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, “but she is really a leader who influences the world in many, many other ways, including helping us all to better understand our basic humanity.”
“We live in a society that is complex and deeply challenging,” said Sister Mary. “Our society most often measures a person by his or her productivity alone and discards the unproductive along the way.
“Pope Francis has called for societal transformation for a more just and compassionate society and policies to care for our planet,” said Sister Mary. “Today, more than ever, we need this revolution of tenderness.
“At Project HOME, our programs and services are based on best practices, implemented with professional effectiveness, so that we can meet the concrete and real complex needs of people seeking to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty. But the real energy behind our progress toward ending homelessness in Philadelphia is that we stay grounded in the power of relationships and spirit of community and family. On a daily basis, we strive to acknowledge each other’s dignities and gifts, and honestly accept and heal our flaws and pains. All our work must be guided in what is truly human.
“We need from you, the next generation of leaders, a blend of personal passion and practical wisdom that can help us break the paralysis of ideological polarization and the stranglehold of concentrated economic power. And we won’t rest until we listen and hear the voices of all and until we are moved to action to address the inequities in our society. We need to challenge the political systems that are controlled by money interests, we need to unite with those struggling and find new paths to economic inclusivity. I am convinced that seeking to heal our broken world is the true path to a life of wholeness for us as well. We are one. The Project HOME community has taught me that none of us are home until all of us are home.”
For more on how you can help those experiencing homelessness, watch the video.
Transformations of Character
“The importance of leadership, at least my experience of leadership,” said Sister Mary, “has been not so much that I have been a catalyst, although I have been part of a movement that has been a catalyst for transformation and change, but that, through my experience with the men and women that are part of the Project HOME community, I am changed. Many people of the Project HOME community taught me how to love, and how to encourage, and how to embrace one another.”
Sister Mary is referring to people like Hyacinth King, whose schizophrenia presented in her junior year of college and who spent years on the streets, struggling with voices in her head and drug addiction, before turning to Project HOME for help “in a moment of clarity.” King was employed by Project HOME in its Outreach Department, and spent the last years of her life reaching out to others.
David Brown was homeless at 14, and spent 25 years on the streets. “I never went to high school, I never learned how to read or write. When I did decide to go into a shelter, the shelter would treat you like a statistic.”
It was Ed Speedling, who was a colleague of Project HOME and a part of the Nerney Leadership Institute Advisory Board before his death last year, who reached out to Brown and convinced him that Project HOME was different from other shelters.
“I got sick,” said Brown. “Ed Speedling came to the hospital with the clothes off of his back for two weeks straight. I said, ‘This man is an angel.’ This man didn’t know me from a can of paint. But the love that this man showed made me feel like this is where I need to be.”
Brown lived on the Parkway at the Youth Study Center, what is now the Barnes Foundation, with 24 others. Of the 25, 23 have died “due to the elements of the streets,” said Brown. “Me, I’m grateful to be at Project HOME.”
With the help of Project HOME and the Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology Labs, Brown has a third-grade reading level, a ninth-grade math level, and is employed at HOME Spun Retail Boutique, a Project HOME enterprise. He mentors children in his community and serves as an imam in prisons.
“If you give a homeless person these four things, they won’t be homeless for much longer,” said Brown, paying homage to the impetus behind Project HOME’s name. “Give them the ‘H’—housing. You give them the ‘O’—opportunity. You give them the ‘M’—medical, and you give them the ‘E’ —education, they will be homeless no longer.”
Michael Oliveri spent 15 years on the streets, living on a bench in Rittenhouse Square, “one of the most affluent properties in the city,” said Oliveri. “If I sat in Rittenhouse Square, I could pretend, and make myself believe, that it wasn’t as horrible as it was. Sister Mary would be in there, engaging the men and women on the park benches, trying to get them help. But, I was so ashamed of me that I could never face her. I’m an Italian, Catholic boy who grew up in South Philadelphia, and I was ashamed to present myself in front of a nun.”
Oliveri has been a resident of Project HOME for five years, and volunteers in as many facets as he can. “I’m what they call a resident leader, I love Project HOME,” he said.
For Sister Mary, ending and preventing homelessness is about the transformation of lives—not just the lives of those experiencing homelessness, but of ourselves.
“The revolution of tenderness is rooted in personal relationships, and seeks to weave a new web of human community and inclusion,” said Sister Mary. “It calls us to learn to listen to those who may otherwise be invisible to our blinded society.
“However many obstacles we face, however many voices insist that some things are practically impossible, like ending homelessness, we keep fighting because we’ve seen miracles happen, because we’ve seen lives transform, and because our lives have been transformed. The greatest challenge is not transforming the lives of individuals experiencing homelessness, the greatest challenge is transforming a society where we have the resources, the financial capacity to end homelessness, but we somehow can’t find the political will. We, our society, is the one in need of transformation.”