Up Close: Sister Mary Explains It All

by JoAnn Greco 

Sister Mary Scullion had yet to take her final vows of poverty when she decided to depart from the norm for the annual retreat required by the Catholic Church. Rather than spend her time at a monastery in reflection or solitary prayer, she yearned for something different. “I went to mass everyday, but I knew that I felt closest to God when I was working in a soup kitchen or doing outreach on the streets,” she says. So she decided to spend this mandatory break experiencing hunger and homelessness herself.   

“Being very isolated and not having either the most basic of creature comforts was very hard, both physically and mentally,” Scullion, now 72-years-old, recalls. “Not sleeping very well because of fear, not taking showers, eating whatever I could find. I was truly depleted at the end. And it had only been one week.”  

It wasn’t the first, or the last, time Scullion would go rogue — she announced her intention to become a nun while still a teenager, earlier than even her devout parents thought prudent, and then spent her ministry as a civically disobedient advocate who managed to get herself arrested four times. But those seven long days and nights on the street would prove pivotal to Scullion, eventually leading her to co-found Project HOME, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit devoted to breaking the cycle of homelessness. More than 35 years later, the organization manages about one million square feet of real estate across 25 newly developed and adaptively reused buildings. In addition to some 1,000 units of affordable housing, its portfolio includes separate facilities in North Philadelphia for health care, community gathering, and employment and education programming, as well as a walk-in engagement center at Suburban Station for people experiencing homelessness. 

She recently stepped down from running things, but Scullion is still out there getting stuff done. She spends a couple hours a week strolling Center City or Kensington, chatting with those living outside. Instantly recognizable by her energetic, lanky form and cap of strawberry blonde hair, she’s regularly approached before she even stops to say hello.  

“Often, that’s about someone wanting food or medical care,” she says. “But ultimately our goal is to try to get them into housing. Engaging with people has always been my favorite part of this job and I’m not about to stop doing that.”   

And the vocal activism — delivered in a Philadelphia accent — that made Scullion famous hasn’t disappeared either. Today’s political rhetoric of “lumping the homeless and urban crime and illegal immigration all together makes it even more challenging for us to find our voices and ways of resistance,” she says. “But these frightening attempts at dehumanizing people and attacking a system that may not be the best, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep shouting about the priority of affordable housing.” With about half of all Philadelphia renters considered cost-burdened (paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent) the “system doesn’t have to be perfect,” Scullion adds. “We’ve just got to get to the finish line — because more and more people cannot afford a roof over their heads.” More than 90 percent of those who move into one of Project HOME’s units never go back on the street and some eventually progress on to market rate housing. 

Scullion traces her dedication to eradicating homelessness to her youth. She volunteered at a summer camp run by the Sisters of Mercy. That experience compelled her to enter the community as a postulant, a period of inquiry where a candidate explores whether she is called to become a nun. Although her Irish immigrant parents were religious, they asked her to wait.  

“I told them I felt a real desire to strive toward ‘holiness’, whatever that meant. And if I went and found out it wasn’t for me, I’d leave,” she recalls. “What I found was that it isn’t we who are seeking God, but God who is seeking us.” 

She kept her toes in secular matters, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology from St. Joseph’s University in 1976 and honing her chosen ministry by working at homeless shelters. She took her final vows in 1980 and five years later started Women of Hope, a safe haven for mentally ill women in Old City, under the auspices of Catholic Social Services. “Many of the neighbors were vociferously opposed to the residence,” she says. “One of the things I kept hearing was that I didn’t even have a professional degree in the field. So I went to Temple University to get a master’s in social work.”  

She learned a lot, she says, “but I learned still more — about resilience and being seen — from the people I met every day on the street. I learned just by listening and by asking, What finally made you come in?”   

One man, Sterling, told her about living in the subway and how he felt as most people walked by without looking at him. But once in a while someone would talk to him and it was through their eyes that he saw himself as someone who mattered. “So I learned that we are each other’s mirrors,” says Scullion. “Or I would work with the kids living in our residences who had once been homeless. We’d be telling jokes — Why did the chicken…? — and someone would just yell out a punchline Because he was homeless! I learned how pervasive the experience is, how it sticks with you even if you’ve finally landed in a warm place with a roof over your head.” 

With Project HOME, Scullion and co-founder Joan Dawson McConnon, then a student at Drexel University, took the idea of soup kitchens and safe havens a step further, pulling people off the streets and into permanent housing. “We saw a need that wasn’t being met,” she explains. It was a novel idea at the time, and the organization accumulated laurels — Time Magazine even named Scullion as a “Top 100 World Beater” in 2009 — for its innovative thinking and initiatives. 

Around the time she was starting Project HOME, Scullion founded the first-of-its-kind Outreach Coordination Center. “It was a time when we were really learning the power of computers and we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could create a database to get a handle on the homeless population,” says Scullion. “How many men? Women? What ages? Mentally ill? Suffering from addiction? We needed to know who was out there in order to find the right solutions. Doing something ‘easy’ — like helping someone catch up on paying their utility bills — can prevent long-term homelessness.” More recently, before retiring from Project HOME, Scullion led the organization in forming the Estadt-Lubert Collaborative for Housing and Recovery, a partnership with Jefferson Health, Penn Medicine and Temple Health. Made possible by a $25 million lead grant from philanthropists Pam Estadt and Ira Lubert, the program integrates opioid addiction treatment with permanent supportive housing.   

“There’s always new challenges — like the opioid crisis — but doing this work over the decades has convinced me that homelessness is a solvable problem,” says Scullion. “Providing a place in which a previously unhoused person can live comfortably and even thrive closes whatever gap we perceive between us. It’s a relatively simple solution. All it takes is remembering, It could be us. It is us.” 

JoAnn Greco is a Philadelphia-based journalist who frequently writes about the built environment.