By Gretchen Keiser

To the children she’s helping to serve, June must still seem a long, long time away.

But to Sister Margaret McAnoy, who is coordinating the archdiocese’s summer day camp program, the eight weeks between now and then are short compared to the work to be done.

In her second-floor office at the Catholic Center on West Peachtree Street, a stack of volunteer forms is piled on a chair. The forms, which will be placed in all churches in the archdiocese after Easter, will be used to coordinate those donating time and talent to the day camps, with the three sites where the program will be offered: Sts. Peter and Paul, St. Paul of the Cross and St. Anthony’s.

Her phone has started to ring on a regular basis, as the first calls come in from those looking for a way to help or asking for more information about the program. In between, Sister Margaret, who has taught and served as a school principal in the archdiocese since 1969, leafs through a catalogue showing brightly-colored crafts for children looking for ideas and an address to ask the manufacturer, “What can you give us for free?”

The first volunteers have been as different as their talents: a woman who has offered to help out in the office with clerical and secretarial work, a hefty St. Pius student with a black belt in karate who’s offered to teach kids self-defense, a tennis teacher who wants to help the program and a group of Dunwoody women offering housing to sisters who are coming from out of town to work for the program.

The response has been very encouraging to Sister Margaret, who is working full-time coordinating the summer program. “I’m really excited about people wanting to do something,” she said. “It just goes to show you that if you put the need before people, they’ll respond.”

A collection taken up in the parishes on Palm Sunday will provide the basic funds for the program, but the heart will be volunteers and donated supplies. To accommodate the schedules of volunteers, they are being asked to think about giving two weeks of time during the summer to the program, but the guidelines are flexible. There will also be some working full-time at each of the centers, in addition to parish staff and coordinators.

The same week that volunteer forms go out, schools and churches will also be receiving registration forms for the day camps.

Behind the archdiocesan program, and other summer plans being pulled together by an ecumenical coalition in Atlanta, Sister Margaret sees a heartening development: “The churches are uniting to do something. We’re not waiting for the city or the federal government to step in. We’re saying, ‘We have a place in this whole situation.’”

The responsibility she is taking on, as coordinator and as a liaison to the ecumenical efforts, draws on Sister Margaret’s experience as a teacher and her familiarity with many in archdiocesan parishes through her work with the Cursillo movement.

Now a leader in spiritual direction on women’s Cursillo weekends, she admits that when she first went 10 years ago as a newcomer, she mostly wanted to stop people from asking her to make a weekend and telling her it would change her life. “Ten years later, I’m still involved,” she said, smiling, “because it did change my life.”

Sister Margaret came to Atlanta after 12 years as a teacher and principal in Michigan. An Immaculate Heart of Mary sister, she taught for five years at St. Pius X High School and then moved to the principal’s post as Our Lady of Lourdes School when the Blessed Sacraments Sisters, who had staffed the school, were leaving. Recently, she has combined a teaching schedule at St. Pius with part-time work for the Cursillo program, which, in addition to the preparation for and running of weekends, holds ongoing weekly meetings training leaders.

Her energies will now be turned to the needs of the 600 to 700 children who will be coming to the archdiocese’s day camps, and to the needs of the people coordinating each of the three sites.

With the Palm Sunday collection behind, and the volunteer forms ahead. Sister made only one request for Easter Sunday:

“Please pray for the program.”