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Inspirational Irish Women

People

“You Just Do the Best You Can”

Sister Mary Scullion

For some, the road to a religious life is paved with uncertainty. They wonder: Do I really have a vocation? Do I have what it takes?

Young Mary Scullion harbored no such misgivings. God spoke to the very heart of this girl from an Oxford Circle row home, and she knew it early on.

“There really wasn’t any doubt,” she says. “It was the one thing I wanted to do when I was young. That’s what I felt most drawn to.”

Today, Mary Scullion is as resolved in her commitment to the religious life and the Catholic church’s mission of social justice as she was when she entered the Sisters of Mercy in 1972 at the age of 19. Now extraordinarily well known as the co-founder with Joan Dawson McConnon of Philadelphia’s Project H.O.M.E., one can only describe her life and career as remarkable.

Project H.O.M.E. is devoted to ending homelessness in Philadelphia. Since its founding in 1989, the project has reduced homelessness by half. An estimated 95 percent of the homeless people who enter the program don’t go back to the streets.

That’s impressive. But it is still far short of the goal set by Sister Mary Scullion and her colleagues and supporters. (Among the latter is rocker Jon Bon Jovi.) They live by these words: None of us are at home until all of are at home.

In 2009, Time Magazine recognized Mary Scullion’s good works by naming her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. (She was Number 17 on the list of Heroes & Icons, just before Oprah Winfrey and Sarah Palin.)

Probably no one whose life is described as inspirational gets to that point without being inspired by others. For Mary Scullion, there were many, including activist Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa and Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe, all of whom attended the 41st Eucharistic Congress in 1976, held in Philadelphia.

Sister Mary, who was also there, was especially moved by Father Arrupe. “He talked about how, if anyone is hungry anywhere in the world, the Eucharist is incomplete everywhere in the world,” she recalls. “That has still resonated with me over the past 40 years.”

Another source of inspiration to Mary Scullion is someone who believed in her vocation when others—including her father Joseph, born in Derry, and her mother Sheila from Mayo—weren’t so sure.

“Sister Ellen Cavanaugh was the director of formation (of the Sisters of Mercy). “I do think she had her reservations, but she nonetheless encouraged me and others to participate in workshops for women thinking about the religious life,” says Sister Mary. “She was a wonderful example of what a Sister of Mercy is. She strengthened me by inspiration and by motivation. She was and still is a great woman.”

Although she has been singled out for honor as a “great woman” herself often in her life, Sister Mary Scullion seems dubious about that characterization. “I am a person who struggles, just like everyone else, to be open to God’s grace,” she says. “You just do the best you can.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

Always Looking for the Joy in Things

Siobhan Reardon

Siobhan Reardon (nee O’Loughlin) became the seventh president and director of the Free Library of Philadelphia in September 2008—the first woman ever to serve in this capacity in 114 years.

Previously, Siobhan was executive director of the Westchester (NY) Library System, a 38-member cooperative library system. While there, she launched a public relations and branding program, increased county support by 45 percent, and implemented technological enhancements. Prior to that, she was deputy executive director of the Brooklyn Public Library, serving as chief operating officer of the nation’s fifth largest library system.

Her accomplishments include tripling the size of the Library’s Foundation, spearheading a $15 million capital campaign for an auditorium and plaza for the Central Library, and strengthening the government relations function. She also served as acting executive director and director of finance.

Siobhan began her library career at New York Public Library in several finance roles. She holds a B.A. from SUNY Purchase, an M.A. from Fordham University, and an M.L.S. from the Palmer School of Library Science at Long Island University.

One of nine children in a fourth generation Irish-American family, Siobhan says her parents made sure the family remained closely tied to their heritage. “Growing up with a name like Siobhan O’Loughlin, it was pretty clear that I was Irish,” she jokes.

Her name aside, Siobhan describes her connection to her heritage as something deeper. “I think being Irish comes from within,” she says. “There is a deep sense of pride in culture and a very strong connection to family.”

A strong connection to family has been a constant theme in Siobhan’s life. She credits her parents, especially her mother, as her greatest inspirations in life.

“They believed that a good education is the best investment parents can make in their children,” she explains. Siobhan’s love of learning and stories, which have served her well in her professional career, are traits that she describes as part of “the essence” of the Irish people.

“Being Irish is a beautiful thing,” she says thoughtfully. “The Irish are always looking for the joy in things.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

Living Out Her Vows

Sister Kathleen Keenan

This year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti meant a personal loss for Sister Kathleen Marie Keenan, RSM, senior vice president of mission and sponsorship for Mercy Health System, the largest Catholic health care provider in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

As a decade-long member of the Global Health Ministry Board of Catholic Health East, Mercy’s parent organization, she has visited Haiti, Peru, and other developing countries where the Sisters of Mercy have a presence to set up health care teams in remote communities that have never seen a doctor or nurse.

“On my last trip to Haiti, I had a great visit with Archbishop (Joseph Serge) Miot. Less than a year later, he died in the Cathedral with 100 seminarians who were having a retreat experience. For me, these were not just faces on the media, they were people I knew,” she says.

But because of her work, many earthquake survivors received medical care from Mercy teams, some on the ground, some flown in from Mercy hospitals in the Philadelphia region.

Along with her RSM, Sister Kathleen has another set of letters at the end of her name: MBA. This native of Springfield, Delaware County, the descendant of Irish immigrants from Tyrone, has had a 40-year career of leadership in a variety of fields: As a teacher and principal of parish schools; as director of Catholic education for the Sisters of Mercy supervising 45 schools along the east coast; and finally in health care ministry for which she got an MBA in health care administration and another masters in long-term care administration to add to her masters in education administration.

Today, her job is to insure that everyone who works in a Mercy hospital understands Mercy’s mission: “to provide compassionate care and access to people living in the communities where our hospitals are located.

“We don’t turn anyone away from our hospitals, no matter their ability to pay,” she says. “We try to serve the whole person. There’s a pastoral aspect to our care. We treat the person, not just the injury—mind, body, and spirit, and their families are included in that equation. The Sisters of Mercy are unique among religious. All religious take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. We take a fourth vow—to serve the poor, sick, and uneducated. In some ways you can see I’ve lived out those vows.”

Not just in some ways.

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

“Nothing Stops Me”

Kathy McGee Burns

Kathy McGee Burns grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia where, except for her sister, she was the only Irish girl in the neighborhood.

“I didn’t have much of an ethnic identity,” she says. “My family was well-to-do: We belonged to three country clubs. We were bused to Catholic school because there were no Catholic schools in our neighborhood. I never knew Irish people did step-dancing. The only Irish record we ever had was Bing Crosby and we only played it on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Yet this “clueless” Irish girl went on to become the first woman president of the Donegal Association of Philadelphia, the first president of the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, and next year will be only the second woman to serve as president of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Observance Committee, which oversees the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a Philly tradition since 1771.

That McGee Burns had time to discover her Irish roots is miraculous. By the time she was 21, she was the mother of six children under the age of 4. After the seventh, she became a single mother and enrolled in Montgomery County Community College to get her associate’s degree. It took her eight years. Then another eight years to get her bachelor’s in medieval history at Chestnut Hill College.

In the midst of all that, she met and married Mike Burns, the love of her life, and had two more children. At 50, she entered Temple University Law School where she joined the Brehon Law Society and it was there she had her Irish epiphany.

“In Ireland, Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers were starving themselves to death, and Bobby was the same age as my son Tony. I thought, here I am, with a son that age, and I thought of Mrs. Sands, waiting for her son to starve to death. What would I give my life for? Of course, my children. And I started getting interested in my roots—but I had no idea where we were from.”

Her father could give her only one clue. “We’re related to every McGee in Bridgeport, PA, Kathy,” he told her. So she contacted every McGee in Bridgeport until she found one who offered one slim lead: the lines to an old song they’d heard their parents sing, “We come from Donegal where they eat potatoes, skins and all.”

Of course, she did find her family in Donegal. “Nothing stops me,” she says. In fact, there’s very little Kathy McGee Burns sets out to do that she doesn’t accomplish. Today, she is a successful realtor, a cancer survivor, and grandmother of 13 who knew what she was really looking for when she began that search for her roots. “I grew up in Flourtown,” she says, “but the Irish community is my real hometown.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

Walking the Walk and Talking the Talk

Denise Sullivan Morrison

You can thank her for less sodium in Campbell’s Soups. For the big push by one of the nation’s largest food manufacturers to earn the right to be called “healthy.”

But in a business world rocked by negative headlines and scandal, you may want to thank Denise Sullivan Morrison for believing that integrity is the keystone of successful leadership. And for walking the talk.

“I have a firm set of values and I will not compromise them,” says Morrison, who is president of Campbell’s top profit center, Campbell USA. “If you have a reputation for high integrity, people trust you and I fundamentally believe that you can’t lead unless you have people’s trust.”

Her drive to the top (and yes, her mission is to someday become CEO of a major company) was fueled by her father, Dennis Sullivan, an AT&T executive, who took his four daughters to work long before there was a “Take Your Daughter To Work” day. “He saw the world opening for women long before it happened and spent a lot of time challenging us on things to get us ready,” she says.

The other Sullivan sisters have also made their mark: Maggie is chairman and CEO of a communications firm; Colleen is regional vice president of sales at Expedia, and Andrea is a champion show jumper who was senior VP of sales at AT&T Wireless.

For Morrison, who rose through the ranks of Proctor & Gamble, PepsiCo, Nestle, Nabisco, and Kraft Foods where she was often the only woman in sales meetings (“Sometimes it’s still that way,” she says), success isn’t entirely measured by profits and titles.

For example, Campbell’s is going healthy not just because it’s a good marketing strategy, but because Morrison thinks it’s the right thing to do. She’s a founding member of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, an initiative composed of manufacturers and retailers designed to combat obesity in the marketplace, workplace and in schools through communication and education.

The mentoring she’s received—from her father, from her current boss, Douglas Conant—she’s giving back through her work with Students in Free Enterprise, an organization of college students, academic professionals and industry leaders whose slogan is “a head for business, a heart for the world.”

“They take on projects that teach the principles of free enterprise and good business ethics and that do something for the community, a powerful message that I totally believe in,” she says. “One of my favorites was a group of students in Ghana who taught a village to make soap which they sell and it sustains the village.”

Underpinning Morrison’s achievements, as she’s quick to point out, is her family—her husband, Tom, an entrepreneur, and their two daughters. “I’m blessed with a wonderful home life,” she says. “I have a good balance which is important to me because if I were successful in business and had an unhappy home life, I would not consider myself successful.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

Helping to Make a Difference in the World

Born in Jenkintown and presently residing in Villanova, Emily C. Riley is creative, multi-faceted and generous with her time and connections.

She has been a trustee for a number of significant organizations in such disparate fields as services for the homeless, arts and culture, and higher education. Besides spending happy times with her three adult children and four grandchildren, she loves to travel and has an appreciation for world culture and history.

Emily C. Riley

Today, with her sister Josephine Mandeville as president, and a board of trustees comprised of family members and civic leaders, Emily heads the Connelly Foundation (she is executive vice president) whose mission, simply stated, is to “foster learning and improve the quality of life in the greater Philadelphia area.”

To that end, the foundation gives grants to non-profit organizations working in the fields of education, health and human services, arts, culture and civic enterprise. Its special focus also is providing scholarships to parochial school students to attend archdiocesan high school and developing initiatives in collaboration with the high schools and elementary schools of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The Connelly Foundation, established in 1955 by her parents, John and Josephine Connelly, both children of Irish immigrant parents from Counties Waterford and Tyrone, is the financial legacy of John Connelly’s extraordinary business acumen and work ethic.

Forced to leave school after the eighth grade to help support his family, John Connelly went on to engineer the turnaround of a company, Crown Cork and Seal, that is now literally a textbook example of brilliant business management.

In their lifetime, John and Josephine Connelly raised six children and donated more than $70 million including major grants to Villanova, La Salle, Gwynedd-Mercy and Thomas Jefferson Universities, and Roman Catholic Archdioceses of Philadelphia and Newark, largely to fund Catholic education.

Emily Riley considers herself “fortunate to be able to continue this work.” Though she has a degree in English literature from Rosemont College, philanthropy “was what we were preparing for all our lives.”

“Our parents led by example,” she says. “They both came from modest backgrounds and were very giving people—of their time, resources and compassion. And we trekked along behind them.”

“My work has been rewarding in many ways,” she says, and the word “fortunate” comes up again. “I’ve been fortunate to have the experiences I’ve had and to meet the people I’ve met, like Sister Mary Scullion, who has been a friend for 20 years. It’s part of the pleasure of working in philanthropy to know people like her and to see the difference one person can make in the world … with a little help from their friends.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

Dance, People

A Heart as Big as Her Smile

Rosemarie Timoney and daughter Mairead.

A native of Clady, County Derry, Rosemarie Timoney began Irish dancing the age of four and won the South Derry Championship at the age of 17. In 1961, she came to the United States and five years later, she founded the Timoney School of Irish Dance in Glenside in 1966 as a way to share her love of dance—its fun, camaraderie, and its place in the history of the Irish culture.

Her classes are not just about teaching dancing, but about giving the children the confidence to always be and do their best. Her students don’t compete, but they do support the community. Her dancers have performed at nursing homes, hospitals, for handicapped children and school assemblies, as well as festivals all over.

The 1997 Grand Marshal of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade who also does color commentary during its broadcast on CBS3, Rosemarie is wife, mother of five, grandmother of nine, and has been described as “a virtual library of all things Irish in the Delaware Valley.”

She’s also tough—that must come from her years of playing camogie, the ladies’ version of the Irish game hurling, once described as a cross between hockey, lacrosse, and assault with a deadly weapon. She has traded that for much tamer bowling—she now plays with the St. Luke’s Mother’s League.

Rosemarie Timoney also has a heart as big as her smile. As someone who knows her once said, “It’s useless to try to give Rosemarie anything. She just gives it to someone else she thinks needs it more than she does.” She collects donations of clothes and other items for her thrift shop which benefits her hometown church in Ireland.

And though it will make her blush to hear it, she is beloved. In fact, when you talk to her her family, her dancers, or even the children she crosses to safety in her crossing guard job at Copper Beech Elementary School, the one phrase that comes up again and again is, “we just love her.”

May 13, 2010 by Jeff Meade

People

Four Women You’ll Want to Know

Opinionated, spirited, courageous: the inspirational Rosabelle Gifford.

One woman was an Academy Award winning actress who became a princess.

Another courageously left an abusive marriage and took her children across an ocean to safety at a time when society frowned on divorce and single parenthood.

One heads the major division of a multi-billion dollar company that’s an iconic giant in the food industry.

Another, a nurse on a heart transplant team, dealt with her husband’s history as an Irish political prisoner by working tirelessly for Irish reunification and with her son’s death at the age of 15 in a skateboard accident by creating a scholarship for other skateboarders.

These are just four of the women who will receive an Inspirational Irish Women Award on Sunday, May 23, at the Irish Center, 6815 Emlen Street, Philadelphia.

Princess Grace of Monaco

Philadelphia’s favorite daughter, Grace Kelly, who earned her Oscar playing Georgie Elgin opposite Bing Crosby in “The Country Girl,” later became Princess Grace of Monaco who devoted her time to motherhood and charity until her untimely accidental death in 1982.

Rosabelle Gifford

Rosabelle Gifford was born in Gortward, Mountcharles, County Donegal, 90-something years ago. The mother of 5 was living in post-war London when she decided to leave her abusive marriage, spiriting her children out of the country than emigrating to America where she supported them by working as a nanny in Delaware County. Described as “opinionated, spirited, and courageous,” she was honored in 2009 with the first Mary O’Connor Spirit Award by the Philadelphia Rose of Tralee Centre, a major sponsor of the Inspirational Irish Women Awards. Not only did her large family come to support her, so did some of the children she cared for some 50 years ago.

Denise Sullivan Morrison

Denise Sullivan Morrison leads the Campbell USA, North America Foodservice, and Campbell Canada businesses, which represent approximately $4.9 billion of the company’s net sales and nearly 90 percent of the company’s profits.

But for Morrison, there’s more to it than profits. She has served on the board of the Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger and Leadership California and is a founding member and current board member of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, an initiative composed of manufacturers and retailers designed to combat obesity in the marketplace, workplace, and in schools through communication and education. She is also the mother of two daughters–with a great role model.

Liz Kerr

Liz Kerr, RN, is on the transplant team at Temple University, where she daily confronts life and death. When her own son, Patrick, died in a 2002 accident, she made the decision to keep his memory alive by establishing two scholarships—one for students at Roman Catholic High School where Patrick had been a freshman, and another for high-achieving students who share another of Patrick’s loves—skateboarding.

Her husband, Pearse, who grew up in Belfast, became a political prisoner at 17, released only when authorities learned he was an American citizen, born when his parents lived in the States. Kerr, who has Galway roots, serves as the Freedom for All Ireland officers of Ladies AOH Brigid McCrory Div. 25—the person charged with helping make the dream of a united Ireland a reality. Kerr has been lobbying local lawmakers to pass resolutions supporting Irish reunification: Last year, Philadelphia passed the resolution and Kerr and other AOH members are working with state lawmakers to have one passed at the state level.

Artist Patrick Gallagher, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up on the Main Line, is painting portraits of the women which will hang for several months at the Irish Center and then be on display at the Oscar Wilde House of American University Dublin.

Tickets to the May 23 cocktail reception and awards event are $35 and available at www.inspirationalirishwomen.org. They will not be sold at the door. Information on tax deductible sponsorships are also on the website. For more information, contact Denise Foley at 215-884-1936 or 215-779-1466 or email denise.foley@comcast.net.

Two great groups with strong links to the Philadelphia Irish community and the Irish Center in particular will provide the music: The Boyces and Shannon Lambert-Ryan and Runa. The Boyce Family (they include founding members of Blackthorn) and Shannon Lambert-Ryan literally “grew up” at the Irish Center. “That’s where I learned to dance,” says Lambert-Ryan.

Proceeds from the event will go to support the Irish Center, which has been the focal point of the region’s Irish community for more than 50 years. Ten percent has been pledged to Project H.O.M.E., a nonprofit organization founded by another of the winners, Sister Mary Scullion.

The other winners are:

Sister Kathleen Marie Keenan, senior vice-president of Mission and Sponsorship of Mercy Health System, the largest Catholic health care system in southeastern Pennsylvania
Rosemarie Timoney, founder of Timoney School of Irish Dance and a longtime promoter of Irish culture in the Delaware Valley
Kathy McGee Burns, Realtor, president of the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, vice president of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Observance Committee and mother of nine
Kathy Orr, CBS3 meteorologist, anchor of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day coverage, longtime supporter of Alex’s Lemonade Stand and other charities
Emily Riley, executive vice president of Connelly Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports Catholic education, the arts and other nonprofits.
Siobhan Reardon, first woman president of The Free Library of Philadelphia

April 23, 2010 by Denise Foley

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