Meet Mary Jo Copeland

The people on the streets of Minneapolis call her their "street mother." City officials call her "an extraordinary leader" and an "urban saint." But Mary Jo Copeland, the founder and director of Sharing and Caring Hands, is not looking for praise. She knows from experience what it is to live in poverty and brokenness and she is striving to make the world a better place for the poor today.

Copeland's startup of Sharing and Caring is all the more remarkable given her painful past. She grew up in a family where her parents fought constantly and her emotionally disturbed father often beat her mother. Mary Jo was an emotionally deprived and socially dysfunctional child whom other children made fun of because they didn't understand.
Her self-esteem was almost nonexistent, like that of many other people she helps today. But someone made a difference in her life and her goal is to do the same for others - to bring relief and love and dignity to poverty stricken people.

Mary Jo Copeland - Biography
 

October 23, 1942 - Born in Rochester, Minnesota

June 1960 - Graduated from Holy Angels Academy.

April 1961 - Married Dick Copeland, a DeLaSalle graduate and St.Thomas College student.

1961-1981 - Had 12 children (6 boys and 6 girls) and was a full time mother until the youngest child began school

Volunteer & Work History:

• 1981 - 1985 -- Volunteer at Catholic Charities; recognized for her efforts with the 11 Who Kare Award.

• 1985 -- Started Sharing & Caring Hands, a volunteer organization with few salaries and no bureaucracy. Mary Jo has never taken a salary for this work, money and donations go directly to the needs of the poor. Sharing & Caring Hands is a vehicle for concerned people to get directly involved in helping meet the needs of the less fortunate of our society.

• 1995 -- Built Mary's Place, a beautiful $7.5 million transitional housing apartment complex, born out of love, compassion, and concern for women and children in poverty. This building was made possible through private donations alone. It was expanded to 92 units in 2000 at a cost of $6 million and now houses over 500 people, most of them children.

• 1997 -- Built new $5 million, 27,000 square-foot Sharing & Caring Hands drop-in center that serves the needs of over 1,000 each day.

• 1998 -- Converted old Sharing & Caring Hands building into a Children's Activity Center and Teen Center for the children living at Mary's Place.

• 1998 - Present -- Sharing & Caring Hands grew from a small volunteer organization with a $5,000/mth budget working out of a 2,000 sq. ft. storefront, to a large volunteer organization that spends over $350,000/mth on the needs of over 20,000 people who come through our doors monthly. This work is now being done out of three buildings, worth $19 million, totaling 130 sq. ft. located at the edge of downtown Minneapolis.

Mary Jo is currently the Director of Sharing & Caring Hands and Mary's Place, working daily with the needs of the poor. She is also working to build Gift of Mary Children's Home and Charter School as a supportive addition to foster care.

Honors & Awards:

• 1984 & 1987 -- Rotary Hope Award

• 1987 -- McKnight Foundation Award
• 1990 -- Person of the Week on NBC's Nightly News with Peter Jennings
• 1990 -- The Caring Institute's "One of the Most Caring People in America"
• 1991 -- David W. Preus Award
• 1991 -- Minnesota's Best Entrepreneur in the Social Responsibility Category
• 1993 -- Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Macalester College
• 1994 -- Norman Vincent Peal Unsung Hero Award
• 1995 -- Pax Christi Award
• 1997 -- Toastmaster's International Award
• 1998 -- John A. Ryan Award from University of St. Thomas
• 1999 -- Visit by then Gov. George W. Bush
• 2000 -- Cited in Pres. George W. Bush's acceptance speech
• 2000 -- Franciscan International Award
• 2000 -- Crosier Award for Outstanding Ministry
• 2004 -- Dominican Award

Featured in the Following:

• 1988 -- Catholic Digest
• 1989 & 2003 -- St. Anthony Messenger
• 1990 -- Signs of the Times
• 1991 -- Reader's Digest; Minnesota Ventures
• 1992 -- Star Tribune Magazine
• 1994 -- Good Housekeeping Magazine
• 1995 & 1996 -- Parade Magazine
• 1995 -- Positive Living "Minnesota's Mother Theresa"
• 1996 -- Farm Industry News; Youth Alive
• 1999 -- People Magazine
• 2000 -- Our Sunday Visitor
• 2001 -- Liguorian; Philanthropy Today
• 2002 -- New York Times

Books:

• Peterson, M. (2002) Great Love: The Story of Mary Jo Copeland. Ohio: Quixote Publications.
• Sullivan, N. (2003) My Mondays with Mary Jo Copeland. Missouri: Liguori Publications.
• Nelson, M. (2004) Saving Body & Soul: The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland.
  Shaw Books, a division of Random House.

- Courtesy of mnmile.com -

Download Audio

Click Here to download an mp3 of Mary Jo speaking!

Sharing and Caring Hands
A Compassionate Response to the Needs of the Inner City Poor
A Short History
by
Sue Anne W. Kirkham

Sweet-faced, soft-spoken, motherly; her eyes welling up as she speaks of her magnificent obsession with saying “yes” to God: It is difficult to imagine Mary Jo Copeland as the powerhouse who defied the Establishment and climbed right over conventional wisdom to grow a multi-million-dollar outreach to the poor from the seedling of a $2200.00 cash award. But watch her energetically lead a tour through the multi-level buildings of the safety net organization she established in 1985 - never losing track of an incoming cell phone call or a child wandering away from his mother - and disbelief quickly evaporates.

“ If you see something that needs to be done, do it. Be Jesus’ hands, His heart, His feet, His mouth,”1 she advises, and it is advice that grounds the mission of the Sharing and Caring Hands resource center as it serves the basic needs of thousands of people each month, and of the adjacent Mary’s Place residence, which provides sparkling clean temporary apartments for ninety-two families.

Officially, the guiding principal behind this effort to help those who get sifted through the gaping cracks in the welfare system is a dedication “to the proposition that the community can make a difference in the lives of others though volunteerism, donations, and commitment, and that this can be accomplished without creating an expensive bureaucracy that saps the resources necessary to carry out its vision and achieve its goals,” and without any government funding. “Be a positive presence in the world,” Mary Jo tells both volunteers and clients. “Make the world a better place because you’re in it.”2

This surprisingly upbeat take on things is the key to how a reclusive mother of twelve with a troubled childhood of her own developed into the person the local press has dubbed “Minnesota’s Mother Theresa.” Mary Jo Copeland identifies with the abandoned because, following a few sheltered years in her grandparents’ comfortable home during her father’s World War II military service, she was abruptly uprooted and replanted into a chaotic household at the age of six. Dominated by a mentally ill father who physically abused her mother and emotionally abused his children, her new surroundings offered little security and even less encouragement. She recalls spending countless nights cowering in the corner of her bedroom, trying to be invisible, just praying that the violence between her parents would end, and being told repeatedly that she would never amount to anything.

“If children grow up being told that they are limited, then they certainly will be,” Mary Jo would later say. But in this setting, she came to know firsthand the results of neglect and dysfunction, often going hungry and unbathed and being ostracized by her classmates for being “different.”

So how does this modest woman, who - emulating Christ’s loving attitude - washes the feet of the street-weary people she greets at Sharing and Caring Hands, feel about being compared to Calcutta’s “Saint of the Gutters”? “Well, I’m not her, of course, and it’s humbling,” she says. “But if [that kind of attention] gets people to think about what one person can do, how they can serve others, then it’s a good thing.” Mary Jo also is quick to credit her early churchgoing experiences in her grandmother’s home as being the foundation of her transformation from neglected child to depression-haunted homemaker to community activist. “And prayer, always prayer.” As Michelle Lynne Peterson says in her biography of Mary Jo, Great Love, “She prays daily for the strength to leave her childhood grief behind her and for the ability to conduct her life with the grace that God gave her.”3

It was this devotion to her faith and her firm belief that prayer is the ultimate answer to society’s failures that led her out of the realm of conventional volunteerism and into the challenging world of entrepreneurial benefaction. Having been rescued from the intolerable conditions in her own home by a sensitive priest who helped her relocate to a foster family in her teens, and then finding some peace and security in her marriage to high school sweetheart Dick Copeland, she had committed herself fully to being a loving parent to “as many children as God gave us.” She only ventured out of her home reluctantly at the age of 38, when the last of her twelve children started school.

Then, finding herself panicked at the notion of having a few free hours on her hands, she accepted Dick’s encouragement to learn to drive and to apply her gift of a loving spirit to whatever cause she found worthy and needful. “You’ve got more love in your heart than anyone I’ve ever known. You have to go out and share yourself with the world,”4 he told her. The first step in training for her new vocation was accepting a volunteer position at Catholic Charities’ Branch II outreach program (the Branches) in downtown Minneapolis, but it wasn’t long before her free and loving spirit rebounded from the rigid strictures in place at even this casually operated drop-in center for vagrants, where a daily supply of “coffee and stale donuts” was the central attraction.

Mary Jo shocked the tenured gatekeepers at Branch II when she joined their ranks in 1982. She engaged street-hardened visitors in personal conversation, and gave out items from the food shelf after its official 3:30 p.m. closing time; she handed out a few dollars from her own pocket to a melancholy man whose wife had been moved to a nursing home. Her fellow volunteers had accepted the conditions of restricted access to limited supplies of donated clothing and food and were comfortable with the sparse help they were able to offer in the way of referrals to community service programs.

What they weren’t comfortable with was Mary Jo’s unconventional approach of individualizing the attention she gave each new arrival. “When someone is drowning, you don’t throw them a life-preserver, you get into the water with them,” she would respond. But soon their reports of her unorthodox behavior generated warning letters from the higher-ups at Catholic Charities. Still, Mary Jo continued her quest to expand the center’s resources and to better meet the needs of the indigent. Noting a dreadful lack of good nutrition, she ignored the directive to “go through proper channels,” and personally recruited enough volunteers from local churches to prepare and serve a luncheon meal at Branch II.

More letters of reprimand followed, but the Catholic Charities hierarchy was stymied: This boat-rocker was doing some good, but she was a loose cannon. Meanwhile, Mary Jo continued to serve the poor in her own way, giving out clothing and food from the trunk of her car before starting her volunteer shift. The final blow to the tenuous relationship between the two warring philosophies came in the form of a disagreement over policy. This devout woman was told that she could not, due to rules and regulations imposed by sponsorship from the United Way, give Thanks before the noon meal. She lost the argument, but said the prayers anyway.

“Where there’s hungry people, God said feed them and love them,” she told a reporter for the National Catholic Bulletin in November of 1983. And to those in charge, she explained that the people who visited the outreach center hungered for more than just food. But the affronts to authority were too unsettling and, after two-and-a-half years, she was told that her presence at the Branches was “no longer permitted.”

At the same time, she was chosen to receive an “11 Who Care” award from a Twin Cities news program. Undaunted by rejection and armed with a good idea of what did and didn’t work, she took the small cash award from that honor and set out to help others on her own terms. With no formal plan and based on her husband’s personal guarantee, she signed the lease on a small storefront property on Glenwood Avenue in Minneapolis and started operations in the spring of 1985. “I’ll just open the doors and see what they need, and I’ll help them,” she told Dick.

Based on that simple but elegant philosophy, and assisted by several disgruntled volunteers who had jumped ship following her dismissal from the Branches, Mary Jo opened those doors to Sharing and Caring Hands on a shoestring. With full confidence that God would transform that slender strand of twine into a steel cable, she began to offer services based on the unique perspective that everyone is placed on earth for a purpose. Her outreach experience had taught her that people often need assistance in getting past their pain in order to discover that purpose, but she had seen staggering changes made in the lives of many who had not, at first, been capable of helping themselves.

Also unique to the Sharing and Caring Hands approach was an emphasis on making a personal connection to individuals in need. “Kindness is a conversion. Your smile and outstretched hand are the beginning of a miracle,” she often says. “Be bread broken and given … wine poured and shared. We must not be reservoirs that store up, we must be vessels that pour out.” In that spirit, Mary Jo and a now-burgeoning team of fellow volunteers started the “washing of the feet” tradition that has become emblematic of their overall mission. “It’s what I am called to do,” quotes Margaret Nelson in her book Saving Body and Soul: The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland. “To touch the poor, to get on my knees to them.”5 And to the ones she serves in this manner she says, “Look after your feet; they must carry you a long way in this world and then all the way to the kingdom of God.”

But the washing ritual, in addition to symbolizing Christ’s love, was also a response to the very real physical privation of those whose feet had indeed carried them far already - and often in the same pair of split and ragged, broken-down shoes. And it was most certainly an example of tailoring the ministrations to the circumstances, rather than to a predetermined set of organizational guidelines. But while inspiration is a beautiful thing, there were practical needs for cash flow that couldn’t be ignored.

In order to raise funds for her new operation, Mary Jo wrote letters to all of the churches with which she had previously worked and lined up speaking engagements with local congregations and social groups. In a blaze of true missionary zeal fired by her passion for the cause, she had discovered an unknown talent for public speaking that proved to be essential to the survival of Sharing and Caring Hands. More teaching than preaching and delivered straight from the heart, these speaking forays humanized for the greater public the faces of the downtrodden in their midst and achieved results beyond the wildest imaginings of everyone involved. They also backed up Mary Jo Copeland’s assertion that once people knew of the need, God would move their hearts.

Through these fund-raising campaigns, Sharing and Caring Hands was able to improve the storefront facilities, adding shower rooms for those with no home base; plentiful clothing donations filled to capacity the basement level; a new kitchen could be installed to meet the growing demand; there was ample money in the coffers to help get people off the streets and into apartments; and the career transients now had access to vouchers for rooms at the local YMCA.

In its first two years, the fledging organization had raised $240,000.00 in cash and an equal amount in donated time, services, food, and goods, and had met its goal of bringing relief and love and dignity to poverty-stricken people in the community. But with increased success came increased scrutiny. Critics feared that Sharing and Caring Hands was simply attracting vagrants to the neighborhood, and then enabling them to continue in their “shiftlessness.” But, as Peterson notes, what Mary Jo and her crew were actually doing was “rounding them up from behind nearby dumpsters and bushes and bridges and giving them a refuge and a measure of hope.”6

Mary Jo maintained her focus, and her conviction that “we are here to do God’s will.” The people whose opinions really mattered were standing right beside her - doing dishes and scrubbing floors; sorting clothing and making sandwiches; serving 150-200 people a day - and they could see clearly both the help that was being provided and the growing challenge. Then came the news that the site they had called home for over two years was to be razed for construction of the Target Center basketball arena. This time around they were determined to purchase a property in order to buy security for the program.

That firm resolve served well, as the hunt for a new location presented intimidating financial obstacles. The ideal building - located squarely on the bus line at Seventh Street and Fourth Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, and offering plenty of space for the overflowing clientele - was listed at $240,000.00, and would still require $160,000.00 in renovations and a zoning variance. Stepping out in faith, Mary Jo and Dick signed a purchase agreement. Only then did they lay out a plan to fund the purchase - applying the savvy acquired from experience and pragmatically exploiting Mary Jo’s newfound stature as a leader in community service. When she laced up her trademark tennis shoes and hit the speaking circuit with both feet churning, local press outlets took notice.

Fran Roth, writing for the Catholic Bulletin in 1987, gives dramatic examples of lives salvaged through the resource center’s efforts and defines the specific need in dollars and cents, in order to continue its work. “[But] the poor are not numbers or a business,” Mary Jo told Roth. “They are hearts and souls.” Next, the same Channel 11 KARE TV that had recognized her work with Catholic Charities aired a one-our documentary entitled No Permanent Address. And both the Minneapolis Star and the Saint Paul Pioneer Press had latched onto her cause, running sympathetic stories to promote it.

Throughout the sometimes nerve-wracking period of waiting for God to move hearts, Mary Jo and her staff of volunteers continued to pray, but also worked harder than ever. “Don’t pray too long, you’ll get it wrong,” she tells others who find themselves feeling stuck and helpless. “We must move from prayer to action.” And soon the public, too, began to move to action with financial support and other donations.

Her prayers were being answered, but even more extraordinary ripples would soon emanate from the whirl of favorable publicity as it pulled in the attention of - and a visit from - the president and vice president of Minnesota’s largest philanthropic organization, the McKnight Foundation. While an elegantly clothed 3M heiress and a business-suited Episcopal minister may have seemed out of place amidst the crowds of homeless people toting the entirety of their possessions in plastic trash bags, the Foundation’s stated goal of improving the quality of life “for present and future generations” was a heaven-made match to the Sharing and Caring Hands mission.

Before the representatives from McKnight left that cold winter day, a number of things had happened: They had toured the site and learned about the expanding population of those who needed help getting their lives on track; Mary Jo had prayed with them; she had hugged them. And when they walked out the front door, they had left behind a pledge granting Sharing and Caring Hands the $40,000.00 it needed for the down payment on the new property … and an additional $100,000.00 for building improvements and operational costs. The safety net had been reinforced, and Mary Jo and Dick were well situated to proceed with the planned three-fold expansion.

This windfall was manna to the outreach center’s supporters and volunteers, but with time running short and others expressing skepticism that Sharing and Caring Hands might be taking on more than it could handle, there was reason to keep scrambling. To those who asked for assurance that the success of the new venture would parallel that of the former, Mary Jo Copeland responded with optimism tempered by realism: “If God wants it to be [successful], then it will be.”7 But she was also committed to kindling in those who have much, a desire to give a bit of it to those who have little.

For this purpose, she relied on coverage of the McKnight Foundation grants and accompanying photo footage for the “face-to-face” exposure that softens hearts and opens minds. By the time they were scheduled to move, an additional $200,000.00 in individual and corporate donations had found its way into the Sharing and Caring Hands mailbox.

By January of 1987 the small nonprofit venture had $450,000.00 in equity and the City of Minneapolis had reluctantly approved the application for the necessary zoning variance. But this Copeland juggernaut represented a new breed of independent thinking and some radical approaches to resolving inner city social problems - a domain many elected officials had come to believe they owned. It made them nervous. They weren’t about to allow its blip of activity to wander off their radar screen.

Relieved just to be able to get settled in, Mary Jo and crew accepted the tentative blessing of City approval and proceeded to gut, renovate, and rebuild their new home. All of the services would be continued, but on a much grander scale. The Seventh Street building’s new lower level comfortably held a large clothing area with floor-to-ceiling shelves and an ample shower room; a main floor dining space accommodated oversize cafeteria tables, a full commercial kitchen, and a separate room for distribution of food shelf items; a private area could now be designated for foot-soaking; and at last, there was a bit of office space for Mary Jo and two administrative volunteers.

Within months of its opening, the new building was being used past its capacity. The showers were running in shifts due to overcrowding and a morning meal was added to ease the squeeze of finding everyone a seat at a table. Then the downtown YMCA stopped renting out rooms. Adding urgency to necessity was the phenomenon of the “nouveau poor” who were flowing into overloaded social service programs - those who had buried themselves in easily acquired consumer debt during the boom years, and were now displaced by bankruptcy and foreclosure in unprecedented numbers. These, and the faces of a new generation of homeless: women and children who had left abusive relationships behind, but didn’t know what step to take next. And as always, there were the lost souls, sucked into a chemically dependent lifestyle, whose offspring had inherited the pain and the hopelessness that had engulfed them since birth. “I try not to judge people,” Mary Jo says of this specific problem, “but these children are suffering, they’re being left behind, and we have to do something.”

Part of the “something” that Sharing and Caring Hands had to do was to spend twice as much as was budgeted on medical care and an additional $8,000.00 on motel rooms the first month after the Y shut down its room rental program. The contrast between this Little Mission That Could and its slow-grinding government counterparts now became clearer than ever: rather than cut back on services or close down programs, they set out to resolve the problem of overspending their resources.

But the only solution was to expand - a prohibitively expensive proposition in light of their current budget overruns. To double the size of the property, adding 4,000 square feet and dental and medical clinics, would cost a whopping $450,000.00. Mary Jo’s husband Dick argued against taking on so much additional liability after only two years in the new building. “What was I supposed to do,” Mary Jo recalls asking him at the time, “tell all those people ‘I’m sorry, it’s too soon for me to help you’?” The project went forward.

“You have to follow what God leads you to do,” says the Sharing and Caring Hands director today. “Where there is a need, God will always provide the increase in resources to fill that need. How else can you explain it?”

And for those whose faith was tethered to more earthly considerations, Mary Jo’s continual presence and involvement in the program provided reassurance. Part of that involvement has always been her willingness to do the hard work required to keep things clean and organized - two qualities she cites as essential to keeping the gears well-oiled, whether in a charitable organization or a household of fourteen. As client-turned volunteer, Antonio, tells author Peterson, “If you want to find Mary Jo Copeland, roll up your sleeves and start scrubbin’. She’ll show up right along side you.”

Doubters were further reassured in December of 1989 when the approach of Christmas delivered the gift of a surge in donations: Toys and games; food and clothing; volunteer hours. One lone soul driving home from work, nudged by the good intentions he’d been nursing ever since hearing of Sharing and Caring Hands, turned his car around and made a donation of $10,000.00 on the spot, never having set foot on the premises before. When news of these acts reached local media outlets, the resulting coverage yielded a tripling of cash donations. This godsend left them flush enough to replenish their overspent budget, pay for the cost of the new building project, and bank the cost of operations for the next year.

With the expansion in progress, founder Mary Jo Copeland was accumulating honorary degrees, leadership awards from religious groups, recognition as Entrepreneur of the Year from weighty financial firms, and “Most Caring People in America” status from the National Caring Institute, but this was attention she wanted to reflect back to the causes she cherishes. During her visit to a posh Washington reception to accept this latter honor, she recalls asking herself, “How did I get here? I’m just the foot-washer!”8 But the accolades brought her into elbow-rubbing proximity with the kinds of movers and shakers who make things happen for humble non-profit organizations, and with Marion Laboratories founder Ewing Kauffman of the Students Taught Awareness and Resistance program seated beside her, she started to see the Providence in eating dinner 1,000 miles away from home.

Kauffman was being honored for contributing half his wealth to fund incentives toward educational achievement and away from self-destructive activities, and he was a friend of Minnesota Twins owner, Carl Pohlad. Mary Jo Copeland left Washington with a figurative “letter of introduction” to this local legend that would prove helpful to her future plans for Sharing and Caring Hands, which was again seeing an explosion of need. The first year of the Seventh Street operation required $50,000.00 in temporary lodging expenditures for the homeless, and by the end of 1992 - a mere three years later - more than $300,000.00 was spent on hotel rooms alone.

Once again, according to Michelle Lynne Peterson’s account, the Copelands were stunned by the ever-expanding need. “I could build my own hotel for what we’re spending,” Mary Jo told Dick when that 1992 total was presented to her. And after a pause, she said, “Now that I think about it …” Dick’s response? “Uh-oh.”9 But “act as if it were impossible to fail” would have been an apt motto for the supporters and staff of the now-flourishing Sharing and Caring Hands, and the resource center for the inner city poor had a rich history of ramming through roadblocks.

This time around, the roadblocks were made of different stuff. Mary Jo had been eyeing the weed-infested property right next door to the lot they already owned; its purchase would be the answer to their expansion needs. Another non-profit had let lapse their option to buy, and the property owners were asking $1.5 million for the neglected five-acre space - twice Sharing and Caring Hands’ then-current investment, before any buildings were even constructed. With defeat staring them down, Mary Jo Copeland dusted off that introduction to Carl Pohlad. Dressed in denim, she first marched into the lush corporate offices of banking mogul Pohlad, and then eventually connected with other entrepreneurs in his network, explaining the great need she found at her doorstep and her “one soul at a time” approach to the problem. Some of the fatter cats required more intense stroking, but eventually, the product sold itself.

Having succeeded in getting financing for the land, Mary’s Place Shelter (named after the Virgin Mary) was etched out in cyanotype on the architect’s drafting board. But now there was City Hall to fight. After six months of tedious meetings, and despite the fact that their blueprints met the M1 zoning requirements, the City decided to slap a conditional use stipulation on the property. City planners explained that they were considering changing the property’s zoning, and declined to approve the application for a building permit.

Warned of the risk that Sharing and Caring Hands could lose money and backing, Mary Jo was determined to provide a safe place for children in need. Buoyed by the depth and strength and resilience of her own incredible personal faith, she took on the role of David to this formidable bureaucratic Goliath. “Grace fills the prayerful,” she says in reflecting back to those days, but she also retains some disgust for the time and energy drained by endless meetings with government entities, inveighing, “You shouldn’t have to fight government [in order] to do the right thing for people.”

But fight she did, even as City Council members told the press that it was pointless for Sharing and Caring Hands to oppose their dictates. In response, Peterson recounts, Mary Jo Copeland made her own announcement to the press: she intended to build a $6.5 million shelter for the homeless “as soon as the Minneapolis City Council agreed to let her get those mothers and children out from under bridges and from sleeping in the back seats of cars.”10

City Council members beckoned her to their offices for yet more meetings, but Mary Jo declined, instead stepping up fundraising efforts and ensuring that construction planning continued on schedule. When even her own lawyer advised her to compromise, she was forced to resolve the standoff by filing suit against the City.

The kind of grit displayed by the Copelands and Sharing and Caring Hands made friends as well as enemies, and in his May 23, 1993, column for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Joe Soucheray warns the City of Minneapolis that they are wasting taxpayer dollars trying to force skids under an immovable object.

“Look,” he writes, “it might be this simple: These characters who populate City Hall in Minneapolis have never been up against anybody like [Mary Jo Copeland]. They do not have a clue what lies in store for them … I actually feel a little sorry for these politicians who think they can quiet this human storm with language of codes and ordinances and zoning … Copeland wants to build a beautiful new residence for poor people in downtown Minneapolis. She intends to do this privately. This is such novel thinking that the politicians should be washing Copeland’s feet … Possibly the concept is so novel to lifetime bureaucrats that they are confused by having been left out of the process.”

As this confused body held out against the growing public perception that that they were inexplicably opposed to Good Works, their arguments that this was a bad location for a shelter provided cover for a history of oral promises made to favored commercial developers. But Sharing and Caring Hands owned the property, and Mary Jo needed to get on with using it to best advantage, so she announced her own news conference.
When one member of the press showed up with cameras, touted the services being offered at Sharing and Caring Hands, and gave out telephone numbers for Council members, other reporters climbed aboard. Harassed Council members began experiencing various types of epiphanies, and soon the dance was over. Construction at last got the green flag.

Today, at 65, directing Sharing and Caring Hands is still a full-time, unpaid job for Mary Jo Copeland, who conducts the intake interviews for every applicant for emergency housing at Mary’s Place Shelter and greets every client entering the resource center. “I’ll retire in heaven,” she says.

Twenty-two years into its ministry to the poor, Sharing and Caring Hands exists as a tried and tested vehicle for volunteer commitment and spends only six percent of all money collected on administrative costs and fundraising. Over $300,000.00 is spent monthly providing on-site health and dental care, help with rental deposits, supplemental groceries, three hot meals a day, and clothing to over 20,000 individuals. A small paid staff supervises activities at Mary My Hope Teen Center and Children’s Center, and maintains the grounds of the Mary’s Place Shelter in pristine condition so that the environment is uplifting, providing peace and structure and hope to the ninety-two families it houses for two-to-six month stays.

“Give people a chance to rest their spirit,” Mary Jo explains. “Then miracles happen.” Miracles indeed happen for residents, who are assisted in laying out a structured plan for seeking permanent housing and securing jobs. Seeing this occur on a regular basis keeps Mary Jo and her staff of over 1,000 volunteers encouraged and sustained.

Mary Jo Copeland credits God for her stamina and the success of this outreach. “No one human being could have managed all this,”11 agrees son Mark. And she credits Dick for being her “Saint Joseph,” and taking good care of her. But did the naysayers ever succeed in deflating her spirits? “You can’t pay attention, can’t let them get to you. It just drains you of energy better spent serving others,” she says. “And there are so many opportunities to serve. In the end, the only thing we take with us is what we give away.”

1Margaret Nelson and Keri Pickett, Saving Body and Soul: The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland, (Colorado, 2004), p 19.
2Nelson and Pickett, p 7.
3Michelle Lynne Peterson, Great Love: The Mary Jo Copeland Story, (Ohio, 2003), p 96.
4Peterson, p 90.
5Nelson and Pickett, p 29.
6Peterson, p129.
7Peterson, p164.
8Peterson, p180.
9Peterson, p 196.
10Peterson, p 208.
11Nelson and Pickett, p 30.