By Rebecca Rackoczy, Special To The Bulletin

ATLANTA—South of Turner Field, off of Metropolitan Parkway, is a neighborhood enjoying resurgence, with neat 1920s bungalows, green lawns and soaring property values. It’s here, in a modest office above a church day-care center, that The Sullivan Center operates, a tiny nonprofit with a huge reach.

Its namesake, Sister Marie Sullivan, OP, works in a small space in the center in southwest Atlanta, her windows brimming with plants and her walls decorated with family photos of participants in her economic assistance program. It’s hard to carry on a conversation; the phone in a nearby cubicle rings constantly and it seems the calls from those seeking assistance never stop.

“We don’t have the privacy we need,” she admits.

When others are long past retirement, Sister Sullivan dreams of the future and the possibilities of helping train hundreds more families how to turn their lives around and become financially stable.

The ringing phones and crowded quarters are a mixed blessing attesting to the success of her efforts.

Since The Sullivan Center was formed more than 15 years ago (it was renamed in her honor in 1995), the problems of Atlanta’s poor have increased substantially. No one knows this better than Sister Sullivan. A member of the Sinsinawa Dominican order, based in Wisconsin, this year marks her golden jubilee and fifth decade as a nun. Most of her career has been spent working with individuals in desperate straits in urban America, from Chicago to Kansas City and here in Atlanta for the past 18 years.

Inspired by Sinsinawa Dominicans who taught in her Chicago elementary and high school, Sister Sullivan entered the order at the tender age of 17 in 1947 and was received into the life of women Religious on Aug. 5, 1951. On July 22 she celebrated her jubilee at the motherhouse with 23 out of 25 other jubilarians, many of whom grew up with Sister Sullivan and were inspired by those same sisters.

As a Dominican her order is charged to live “a community life of study and prayer, and to give to others the fruits of your contemplation,” she said.

“The fruits” have been given to others one hundredfold and have spurred her to a life of action throughout her career.

Her mission, and that of The Sullivan Center, has remained the same for 15 years: to provide a helping hand to needy families and individuals who want to free themselves from reliance on subsidies and charity assistance.

The renaissance of The Sullivan Center’s surrounding community — and the irony of seeing homes sell in the six-figure bracket in this once downtrodden area — is not lost on her.

Finding affordable and decent housing for low-income families is fast becoming one of the hardest areas to address, she said. Just finding temporary shelter is proving to be a challenge.

“Eighteen years ago, Atlanta had maybe 100 homeless shelters serving about 3,300 people,” Sister Sullivan said. Today the number of homeless has more than tripled, as shelters and homeless facilities have cropped up throughout the suburbs, from Cobb to Gwinnett County. Housing costs, credit debt, drugs, mental health problems, and even the Olympics in Atlanta have all contributed to the rise, she said. “Even when the economy looks good, a lot of people fall through the cracks.”

Last fiscal year, as a nonprofit agency, The Sullivan Center provided more than 2,500 families with different types of assistance, from helping with utility bills to transportation tokens for MARTA to clothing and food and others with educational and employment assistance. Each month, the center disburses an estimated $15,000 to $20,000 — and that barely covers 10 percent of all the requests for help, she said. She braces herself for extremes in temperatures, when energy costs go up, flooding the center with requests for assistance in paying utility bills.

But she isn’t afraid of a challenge. In 1983, as director of the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta, she planted the seeds of interagency collaboration as the administrator of social services ministry. There, she helped establish regular coalition meetings with churches addressing homeless issues. The work was instrumental in the development of a church-based network that emphasizes personal empowerment and individual responsibility. The Midtown Assistance Center, Buckhead Christian Ministry, Southwest Ecumenical Emergency Assistance Center and the Achor Center, a transitional center helping women and children out of homelessness, were formed as a result of those early efforts.

A year after she became executive director of the Christian Council, she formed the Christian Emergency Help Centers. They became separately incorporated as a not-for-profit agency in 1984 and are now named The Sullivan Center. In 1986, she masterminded MACH, the Metropolitan Atlanta Clearinghouse, the first centralized computer data base linking Atlanta assistance agencies, and allowing a more coordinated and efficient way to track assistance avenues for those seeking services. In 1990 WXIA-TV honored her as one of those contributing good to the Atlanta community by her service.

Her days are often spent writing grants, drumming up corporate sponsorship and looking for other avenues of revenue for the Center. Developing practical solutions to deep-seated problems is a forte of Sister Sullivan’s.

“She has an unwavering commitment to the social justice dimension of the church,” said Father John Adamski, pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Atlanta, where she is a member of the church’s social action committee and where her jubilee was also celebrated this spring.

“She is very faithful in seeing projects through— she has a wonderful, clear focus—and she is so faithful in doing whatever is necessary to make things happen.”

TEACHING SWIMMING

But making things happen didn’t come about at first. Sister Sullivan realized early on that she was seeing the same people, time and again, who could not get out of the cycle of poverty.

“I saw we were saving the drowning, but there wasn’t anything in place to keep them from starting to drown in the first place,” she said in an analogy. And so she began a program of what she calls “economic literacy.”

“I found that it was better if I said, ‘I will not do it for you, but I will walk with you,’” she said.

Walking with someone means helping teach, with financial instructor Mike Adkinson, a four-week course of financial planning and budgeting, nutrition, legal aid and computer classes. Part of the program involves a little “tough love” that talks about cause and effect and setting realistic goals.

“For example, we show the difference in how much it costs to keep turning the thermostat up and down,” as well as how credit card debt piles up, she said. Recently the center hosted a class with more than 70 participants packed into the small classroom space.

The classes have inspired many and her program for economic literacy was picked by the United Way, which collaborates with The Sullivan Center for its Individual Development Account program, which helps low-income families save toward a home.

“The kind of training she provides to very low-income families is about the basics of budgeting and managing your income,” said Jim Beaty Jr., United Way director of community investments. He said other United Ways around the country are seeking to emulate the savings and economic literacy program originated by Sister Sullivan. “Without community partners and folks like Sister Marie, this couldn’t happen,” Beaty said. “You need to have that community involvement.”

The United Way was so inspired by her commitment to helping the poor get out of poverty that they dedicated their 2000 Help Book to her, calling her “a local hero whose thoughts and deeds have shaped the way we compassionately and effectively respond to the needs of others.”

A first-generation Irish-American (her parents, Dennis and Mary Sullivan, were both from County Cork, Ireland, and her father ran a pub in Chicago for more than 30 years), Sister Sullivan knew her desire to be a nun by the time she was in high school in Chicago.

“My parents gave us a great faith, and a desire to help people has always been a part of my life,” she said. As many women Religious did, she had a choice to teach, and she did, working for 20 years as principal of an elementary school. Her love of teaching was partly the inspiration for the economic literacy classes.

Tenacious is one word that would describe her, said Sheila Bissonnette, executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society’s Atlanta council. “Marie’s not shy about asking. She recognizes her role as a Religious in the community to challenge people to live out the Gospel values—and who can say no to a sister?”

“I look to her as a model—I’ve certainly borrowed things that she’s done. And she took the model of St. Vincent de Paul and went to the Protestant churches.”

But beyond the doggedness of purpose, there is a sense of fun, Bissonnette said.

“She loves to dance and have a good time and can do a great Irish jig. There is a humanness in her and a deep caring—and a realism. She understands people—we are who we are (faults and all),” she said.

Relmon Cartee, corporate affairs director for Georgia Power, who also serves as chairman of The Sullivan Center’s board of directors, has worked with Sister Sullivan for the past six years.

“She is a dedicated, concerned person, just sincere in all facets of her work, trying to help people help themselves,” he said.

Added Cartee, “If I was down to my last dollar and gave it to her and came back six months later, I know she’d still have it. She is very trustworthy in what she does.”