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People Weekly
Article People Weekly December 13, 1999 - Mother of Mercy
At most homeless shelters, new arrivals are given the basics:
a cot, a blanket and a plain hot meal. Mary Jo Copeland believes
that is not enough. At her charity in Minneapolis, the 5'6"
dynamo - who drives a white 1998 Lincoln Continental with PRAYNOW
license plates - doesn't give her clients just a pat on the back
or even a gentle caress on the cheek. She gets down on knees and
washes their feet.
In a hard-knock
world, that simple gesture of compassion is enough to bring tears
to the eyes of Wayne Irving, a homeless laborer who arrived in
Minneapolis by bus from Chicago. "Nobody ever did this for
me," he says, sitting over a basin of hot, sudsy water as
Copeland, 57, wearing a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves, rubs
his calloused feet with antiseptic ointment. "I've never
met a lady like her in my life."
Thats because
there aren't many women like Copeland. With little more than a
card table and a couple of coffee pots, she founded a storefront
charity 14 years ago on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Today
she is the guiding light of Sharing and Caring Hands, a $3 million
nonprofit community center that caters daily to as many as 1,800
of city's needy, dispensing everything from hot meals and bus
tokens to eyeglasses and deodorant. "It's heartwarming to
see thousands of people benefit," says Jim Ramstad, a local
congressman and sometimes volunteer." Nobody does more to
help people in need. Mary Jo is a true saint - Minnesota's Mother
Teresa."
Copeland, who
draws no salary, says her work springs from a biblical mandate.
"I believe in what Jesus said about helping the less fortunate
in memory of him," she says. "That's why I wash their
feet. We are commanded to be servants of the poor." But there's
more to her motivation. An emotional woman who sometimes breaks
into tears when talking about her life, Copeland - married for
38 years and the mother of 12 grown children - traces her empath
for the homeless, the working poor and abandoned young mothers
to what she describes as her own painful past.
The daughter
of a Minneapolis clothing salesman and his wife, a hair-dresser,
Copeland says that while she was growing up, "my mother didn't
clean the house. Everthing was filthy. My dad would get up at
3 in the morning and rant and rave. He'd beat my mom....I'd lie
in my bed scared to death." Gertrude Holby, Copeland's late
mother, cautioned in a 1992 newspaper interview that her daughter
was prone to exaggeration and was "always a little different,
high-strung."
Still, she
acknowledged that her daughter's perspective on life was shaded
in part by her difficult youth. Copeland's compassion for the
dispossessed was also likely shaped by the responsibilities she
knew as a caring mother as well as the emotional trails she faced
after two miscarriages and a deep depression that led to a struggle
with Valium. She says she quit the drug after five years, "cold
turkey, on my own. One day I said, 'No more.' "
To Copeland's
devoted followerers, the details of her past matter far less than
her undeniable generosity." When she was growing up, my mom
didn't have love, caring or anyone saying, 'Hey, you can do it.
We're praying for you,' " say Copeland's son Mark,31, her
$39,520-a-year general manager and one of the center's seven salaried
employees. "And that's what we do here - we offer hope, prayer
and whatever practical help people need."
And they need
plenty. On a typical morning, Mary Jo rises at her customary 3:45
a.m. A faithful Catholic, she says a rosary while racewalking
for exercise around her parish church. Soon she is at the center,
comforting the teary mother of two toddlers, who tells her that
she is trying to escape an abusive relationship. "I'll help
you, honey," says Copeland, planning to find the family a
spot in her 56-apartment trasitional-housing facility." We'll
put you in a nice, safe place to stay." In the same breadth,
Copeland suddenly spins to confront a stylishly dressed youth
talking on a cell phone." How dare you bring that into a
shelter!" she shouts. "Why aren't you out working? You
get out of here right now! Come on, let's go!"
The whip-cracking
is part of the Copeland style as she plays field marshal to a
corps of 1,000 volunteers while juggling requests from the hundreds
of petitioners who line up daily to ask for help with car payments,
rent or finding job. "I've seen people try to put one over
her, but she puts her foot down," says Carrie Dahlquist,
a recovering alcoholic. "Sometimes she loses her temper,
but I don't blame her. People have to act right."
Copeland is
just as strict with the center's purse strings. According to the
Charities Review Council of Minnesota, a local watchdog group,
an impressive 94 percent of the center's $3 million annual operating
budget is channeled directly to the poor. (Copeland has raised
an additional $13 million in various building drives, all from
private donations.) "Every nickel you give is going to a
needy person," says Tom Lowe,67, chairman of a local lumber
company, who has donated more than $600,000 over the past seven
years "Mary Jo sets an example for this kind of work."
For Copeland,
who raised her own sizable family in an 828-square-foot bungalow
before moving 11 years ago to a modest four-bedroom house in a
nearby suburb, frugality - and hardship - are nothing new. As
a girl, she says, "I remember living in a corner of my room.
My dad worked, but he didn't give us anything. I'd go to the bingo
halls at night when my mother played for food. Sometimes we ate.
Sometimes we didn't." For solace, Copeland turned to the
church, cutting flowers from neighbours' gardens to place in front
of a statue of the Blessed Virgin. "People thought I was
a little goofy, being so religious," she says. "But
it gave me such comfort. It was all I had."
At least until
a mixer during her sophomore year in high school, when she met
Dick Copeland, son of a former newspaper executive. "We danced.
I sparked with her," he recalls. "After that, we were
together, dating like you did back in the '50s." According
to Dick,58, an executive buyer for a grocery-store chain, his
parents didn't approve of his troubled girlfriend: "My mother
was sophisticated and controlling. She had her own ideas of what
she wanted for me, and Mary Jo wasn't it." For her part Mary
Jo remembers going to the Copeland house for dinner, "but
they wouldn't let me eat with them. I'd have to sit in the car."
Despite his
parents' opposition, Dick married Mary Jo in 1961, and by 1977
they were the parents of six boys and six girls, now ages 22 to
37. Family life was "incredibly gratifying, but exhausting,"
recalls Mary Jo. "I didn't have any friends, and the neighbours
thought I was crazy for having all those kids. I was dealing with
my own childhood issues, plus the physical and emotional stress
of all those pregnancies" - not to mention the miscarriages.
For several
years beginning in the mid-'70s, she lived in her housecoat, seldom
venturing outside. Then in 1981, when their youngest child daughter
Molly, left her preschool, Dick encouraged his wife to expand
her universe beyond the family's needs. "She'd spent all
those years at home and didn't know what she was going to do,"
he says. "I told her she had to take all that love into the
world."
That year Copeland
volunteered at a local branch of Catholic Charities but soon ran
afoul of its bureaucracy. "They wouldn't deviate from their
policies." she says. "If people where hungry and the
food shelf was closed for the day, I'd run out to my car and get
them some food." Four years later, using $2,200 from a public-service
award, she signed a three-year, $36,000 lease on a small storefront
that has grown to include a $6.5 million shelter and a 27,000
square-foot main building that opened in 1997.
There, on Sundays
when she's not tending her garden or doting on her 13 grandchildren,
Copeland can be found with her daughter Barbara,30, a lab technician,
cleaning toilets and setting out silk flowers and potpourri. "I
grew up with everything so dirty," she says with a conspirational
wink. "I like everything to be spotless."
 
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Readers Digest August 1991 - Someone Who Cares by John G. Hubbell
A young woman
is crying so hard she cannot talk. Hours earlier she had found
her daughter dead in her crib, a victim of Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome. Unmarried, with five other children, she is on welfare
and does not know how to arrange for a burial. Her friends take
her to a two story brick building in downtown Minneapolis. The
sign above the door reads Sharing and Caring Hands.
Mary Jo Copeland,
the well-dressed and well-groomed director of the center, hugs
the woman. "Don't worry. Your baby's going to have a funeral.
We'll take care of everything. Pray with me." Then Mary Jo
calls the county welfare department, which agrees to pay $572
toward the baby's burial. She finds a cemetery plot and a priest.
Mary Jo created Sharing and Caring Hands to provide food, clothing,
dental care, a room for the night, a shower and shave or a bus
ticket home to people who fall through the cracks of the welfare
system. She reaches out to anyone who asks for help: battered
women and children, vagrants, chronic alcoholics, drug addicts,
the mentally ill, ex-convicts. "So many programs have eligibility
requirements and frustrate and defeat people," say Minneapolis
Mayor Donald M. Fraser. "But with Mary Jo, all anyone has
to do is walk in."
Now, an older
woman enters the building with a nine-year-old child. Outside
it is far below zero, and the girl is shivering, wearing only
a thin dress and sandals. He eyes are swollen shut, and bruises
and cuts cover her face and arms. "Her mother got drunk and
beat her up," her grandmother explains. It happens a lot."
Mary Jo's eyes flood with tears as she talks to the youngster.
Are you cold honey? Do you hurt? At first the girl looks away,
but as Mary Jo gently persists she finally turns and lets herself
be hugged. Helpers take the child for a hot bath; then they provide
winter clothing. Mary Jo encourages the grandmother to initiate
the legal steps that will transfer custody of the girl from her
mother to her grandmother.
In walks Curtis Snow, 32, an out-of-work chef. Several weeks before
he lost his job and hasn't been able to find another. He, his
wife and their two daughters have been sleeping in their car.
"I applied for federal assistance but was told nothing could
be done before the end of the month," he says.
Mary Jo finds
the family an apartment, pays enough rent to carry them to their
first federal payment and gives Snow some money to live on. Meanwhile
he will keep looking for a job.
"Oh-oh,
Mary Jo." No one who comes to Sharing and Caring
Hands knows more about deprivation and loneliness than Mary Jo
Copeland. Born in Rochester, Minn., in 1942, she spent the first
six years of her life in the home of her affluent grandparents,
who cherished and pampered her.
Mary Jo was only vaguely aware of her parents, who visited occasionally
but never showed any affection for her. She later learned that
her father was unable to support his family and had left her with
his parents. When Mary Jo's mother had a baby boy, the grandparents
thought it was time to bring the family together. Mary Jo moved
in with her parents.
Often her father
awoke in a rage, cursing his wife for her abominable cooking and
housekeeping. In the evenings he might beat her. My mother would
scream and plead with him," Mary Jo remembers, "and
I'd sit outside for hours praying that my mother wouldn't die."
Her mother's
main focus in life says Mary Jo was simply "to keep my father
from becoming angry." Yet she was so overwrought that she
frequently seemed incapable of dealing with the things that enraged
him. The house was never clean," Mary Jo recalls. Beds went
unmade, rooms undusted; dishes rarely got washed. The tub was
filthy, and I couldn't take baths."
In Parochial
school, Mary Jo remained aloof and alone. She had awful body odor.
Other children would shout, "Oh-oh, there's Mary Jo."
And hold their noses. "I was in such emotional turmoil that
I couldn't concentrate on schoolwork. My poor report cards enraged
my father, and he would insist I was stupid and worthless."
"Don't you see?" The one thing that did fire her interest
in school was religion class. I was enthralled with the idea that
God loves us all equally and unconditionally," she says.
"I memorized my catechism and said the rosary all the time.
Soon I realized there were lots of children like me - some even
worse off. I began to know that God had some special task in mind
for me."
Mary Jo's father
required her to pay a good share of her Catholic high school's
tuition. She stayed after school each day and scrubbed floors
and blackboards.
One evening during her sophomore year she went alone to a dance.
Spotting an attractive lad, she approached him on the pretext
that she was looking for someone. "Are you Tom Kelly? She
asked, making up the name. He said he was not, and she started
to walk away. "Wait a minute," he said, "would
you like to dance?"
His name was Dick Copeland, and they danced all evening. He saw
her home and asked if he could call her for a date. Soon they
were together constantly, though it was a year before Mary Jo
told him about her home life, which was becoming increasingly
unbearable.
One summer
Dick got a glimpse of the instinct burgeoning inside Mary Jo.
"She was working in a dime store," he says, "and
one rainy day after she picked up her paycheck we saw a young
mother walking with a couple of children. They were raggedly dressed
and obviously very poor. Mary Jo talked to the woman and took
her to a supermarket. She spent her entire paycheck on groceries
and then gave her own raincoat to the woman. I said, "Mary
Jo, your father will kill you!" She said, "I don't care.
She needs a coat. Don't you see how poor they are?"
"Leave
Me Alone!" In June of 1960, Mary Jo graduated from
high school. The following year she and Dick were married. She
was employed as a nurse's aide while Dick worked his way through
college.
The children
came early and often. Dick left college for a job with a department
store, and the family bought a house in the suburbs. "We
took our children to the park, circus, zoo and the beach,"
Mary Jo says, We made sure they had normal, happy lives."
Every Christmas the family wrapped presents they had bought for
poor families. "We wanted to teach our kids the right way
to live," she explains.
While expecting her seventh child, Mary Jo fell into a terrible
depression. A physician put her on a tranquilizer, which helped,
but she kept using it after the baby was born. Soon she had trouble
sleeping, so the doctor gave her sleeping pills; then he prescribed
a powerful painkiller to help her through her eighth pregnancy.
I was taking a combination of Valium, painkillers and sleeping
pills every day." She says.
For nearly
five years she was addicted. It wasn't until her twelfth child
was born that that she summoned up the courage to dump all her
pills down the toilet. But she had started drinking on weekends.
"I found a single drink relaxed me," she said. "So
I began taking two, three, the four and five drinks.""You're
replacing one addiction with another!" Dick warned. "Leave
me alone!" She screamed and stormed off to the bedroom. She
fell to her knees and prayed, "Please help me Lord. I'll
never accomplish any thing this way." Soon after, she stopped
drinking.
Doughnuts
and Sandwiches. The birth of Mary Jo's twelfth child
had resulted in a hysterectomy. Her whole life seemed to catch
up with her - the terrible years with her parents, the bitter
loneliness of her school days, the struggles of raising such a
large family, her addictions. Overwhelmed, she went through the
motions of life - cooking meals, sending the kids to school, cleaning
house - but she had no real interest in things and she felt unneeded.
For nearly
three years she didn't leave the house, didn't even bother to
get dressed. Finally one day Dick said, "Mary, you can't
bottle up all the love that's inside you. Look what you've accomplished
with our kids. You've got too much to share with the rest of the
world!"
She became
a volunteer at Catholic Charities, worked at a storefront location,
serving coffee and donuts to street people, talking to them by
the hour, learning about them. An innovator, she contacted parishes
throughout the city, offering them a chance to prepare, deliver
and serve a hot lunch to the poor one day per month. Many congregations
were eager to do so, and soon hundreds of people were being fed
at Catholic Charities every day.
Mary Jo chafed
at the bureaucracy that governed organized charity, however. She
hated the idea that needy people had to suffer interviews and
fill out forms before they could be fed and clothed. "I've
seen workers turn away a guy who's starving, because he showed
up an hour after lunch was served," she says. "Who cares
what time it is? Take him in the kitchen and make him a sandwich!"
She dreamed
of starting an all-volunteer program that would accept no federal
or state money. Meanwhile, she kept circumventing the bureaucracy.
While shopping for her own family, she bought extra shoes and
shirts to give away to the poor. She also handed out five and
ten dollar bills to help with financial emergencies.
Dream
Come True. Mary Jo's efforts began to attract attention.
In 1985, she received an $1100 public service award as well as
$1100 from a local TV station and decided it was time to make
her dream come true. She found an inner city storefront and put
the sign Sharing and Caring Hands in the window. "I had to
sign a $36,000 lease for three years," says Dick, a food
company buyer. I had no money, but Mary told me not to worry about
it." He Grins. "So I signed it."
To get funds
and volunteers, Mary Jo wrote to business leaders and spoke before
civic groups, foundations and churches. She discovered to her
surprise, that she was a powerful speaker. "People were spellbound
when she laid out a picture of God's working in the world through
the poor," said the Rev. Lawrence Johnson, a Maplewood priest.
"She made it seem possible to make a difference."
Today a thousand
volunteers help her minister to the hundreds who crowd into Sharing
and Caring Hands during the day. Individuals, corporate foundations
and businesses have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mary Jo has
been recognized by the governor of Minnesota, the Mayors of Minneapolis
and Brooklyn Center, Minn., and many organizations. Last December,
the Caring Institute celebrated her as one of America's ten most
caring people, "those exceptional few who by their selfless
acts ennoble the human race.
A homeless
man wearing an ancient, tattered parka limps into Sharing and
Caring Hands. It's my feet," he tells Mary Jo. They hurt
so bad I can hardly walk."
She kneels and begins removing the torn, worn out tennis shoes
from his ulcerated feet. She brings a basin of warm soapy water
and gently washes them, applying disinfectant and a soothing ointment.
She dresses his feet in new socks and walking shoes. "Look
after your feet," she tells him. "They must carry you
a long way in this world, and then all the way to God." Her
eyes brim with tears as she watches him walk away.
"Jesus
washed his Apostles feet," she explains. He came to serve,
not to be served. Can we do less?"
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Star Tribune
October 24, 1994 Dick Youngblood column
Faith,
talent for persuasion help her help the homeless - Mary Jo Copeland
Armed with
a high school diploma, a rare talent for persuasion and a deeply
ingrained distaste for bureaucratic flapdoodle, she runs what
amounts to a $3 million a year business.
She's won the ear of the Twin Cities corporate elite, raised millions
in capital in pursuit of her latest ambitious goal and even gone
to war with City Hall - and won.
In fact about the only difference between her and your everyday
entrepreneurial success is that she regards prayer as her most
potent strategic weapon.
She's Mary
Jo Copeland, 52, the founder and chief executive conscience of
Sharing and Caring Hands, Inc. the all- volunteer outfit she started
in Downtown Minneapolis in 1985 to help feed the very poorest
of our fellow citizens.
There's an excellent reason for talking about Copeland in business
terms. Consider the explanation that business mogul Irwin Jacobs
offers for why she was able to extract a $100,000 donation from
him to help build a $6.5 million shelter for homeless families
and vulnerable adults now under construction next to her headquarters
on 7th St. in Minneapolis.
"She's
a doer, not a talker," Jacobs said approvingly. What's more
he said, "She has what it takes for success -common sense"
Or contemplate
the reason why Jim Binger, the former Honeywell chairman, figures
Copeland is able to talk folks like him and his wife out of a
$250,000 donation for the shelter: "She's strong, she's dedicated
- and she's tireless," he said. Whether he meant tireless
in her work or in pursuit of donors was not clear.
Perhaps the
best rationale for including Copeland on the business pages, however,
came from Jim Shannon, the former Roman Catholic bishop and retired
executive director of the General Mills Foundation.
"Mary Jo proves what Peter Drucker was talking about when
he said that the non-profit sector has more flexibility and creativity
than either the business or the government sector." Shannon
said.
Besides, he added, Copeland is effective in her dealings with
corporate bigwigs "because everyone wants to be associated
with success," Shannon said. And Mary Jo is phenomenally
successful."
The object
of this attention is a motherly, congenitally cheerful woman who
mixes an engaging smile with iron persistence and an intense,
rapid-fire way of expressing the urgency of her mission.
She's also an unabashedly devout Roman Catholic - she attends
mass and takes communion a 5 every morning - who believes utterly
in the power of prayer. She is motivated, she says, by "a
compelling passion to serve God."
The product of "a dysfunctional family" that made her
childhood a high stress nightmare of physical and emotional abuse,
Copeland said that she "promised Goad as a young child, that
I would devote myself to helping others the way He helped me through
that horrible life."
Although she
tends to count her success in terms of the 12,000 poor people
a month who receive crisis services from Sharing and Caring Hands,
her financial books tell and equally imposing story: In fiscal
year ended April 30, Copeland raised $2.9 million in operating
funds, up 43% from $2 Million in fiscal 1993.
The growth was not a fluke: In the past five years, she has boosted
contributions to her operating funds by an average of nearly 30
percent a year. None of it has come from the government, which
Copeland regards as hopelessly bureaucratic and inefficient."
There's no
love or compassion in government," she said with what sounded
like a lady-like snort. "They spend too much money on task
forces."
Here's the
best part: Only about 3 percent of the operating funds she collects
- a pittance compared with many other charitable organizations
- goes for management and fund-raising expenses.
Copeland, who works four 10-hour days a week and then makes fund
appeals at church services on Saturday and Sunday, has never drawn
a salary (her husband, Dick, is a buyer at Rainbow Foods). All
staff members are volunteers, as well, and she can get downright
indignant at the notion of charities that pay their executives
six-figure salaries and back then up with large, expensive staffs.
I don't expect
everyone to volunteer," she said. "But paying someone
$145,000 a year to distribute money to poor people? That's ridiculous.
Those executives don't need more than $50,000, if that. And they
could do with about half as many staff people too."
Copeland's
distaste for red tape started in the early 1980's with volunteer
work for a prominent charitable organization that she considers
to be weighed down by "so much unnecessary policy, procedure,
paperwork and bureaucracy that there was never enough money for
the poor people."
In 1985 she won $2,200 as one of KARE-TV's "Eleven Who Care."
She gave half of the award to a local church and used the other
half to rent some space on the edge of downtown Minneapolis and
founded Sharing and Caring Hands.
The mother
of twelve children, Copeland has never regarded the growing operation
as a burden. "After raising that many kids, this is a cakewalk,"
she allowed.
In addition to the growing statsh of operating funds, she has
also raised $5 million in the past three years to build the 57-room
200-bed shelter on which construction started in May.
She actually
justifies the expenditure as a cost saving. As the homeless problem
has grown, she said, so has the cost of providing emergency shelter
for homeless families at eight hotels and motels in the area.
"I spent $400,000 on that alone last year," she said.
One of the
most relentless and effective networkers this side of the Minneapolis
Club, Copeland raised the money for the shelter from some of the
most prominent business names in town: Burt McGlynn, chairman
of McGlynn Bakeries, chipped in $500,000; Minnesota Twins owner
Carl Pohlad matched the $100,000 that his pal, Jacobs contributed;
the McKnight Foundation donated $300,000, the Bush Foundation
added $200,000 and the General Mills and Cargill foundations gave
150,000 apiece.
Despite the
need and her prominent support, however, the Minneapolis City
Council tried for a time to derail the shelter project on the
grounds that it didn't belong in the area zoned for industrial
use.
However, our city fathers and mothers reckoned without Copeland's
secret weapons - prayer and a warm relationship with talk show
host Barbara Carlson, a Sharing and Caring volunteer several years
ago.
Outraged by the city's cockeyed position, Carlson moved her show
onto the roof of the Sharing and Caring Hands headquarters one
morning, implored her listeners to make their objections known
to the council members and even provided the member's telephone
numbers - all in the interest of smoothing the communications
process, you understand.
Hundreds of
telephone calls later, the council voted to give Copeland a zoning
variance.
She's still about $1.5 million short of covering the full cost
of the shelter project, but Copeland figures to raise that with
her Christmas appeal. The odds are, she'll get it too. McGlynn
said with a chuckle.
"She's a helluva salesman," he cracked. "To get
that much money out of me she'd have to be." Then, more seriously,
he added, ""She's the Mother Teresa of Minneapolis as
far as I'm concerned. Look at what she does without any bureaucracy
whatsoever. Everything she brings in goes right to the people
who need it."
Copeland tends
to agree with McGlynn's assessment of her sales abilities. "God
has given me the gift for (public) speaking." She said matter-of-factly.
In fact, she confided, she's so good that the churches she visits
for weekend fund appeals do not welcome her during the Christmas
season, on which many of them rely for a significant share of
their own income.
"They
know I'd tap out every dime available," she said with a grin.
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