[NEWS] Philadelphia's saint of the streets

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Philadelphia can stop calling Sister Mary Scullion its own Mother Teresa. Sure, she is a Roman Catholic nun. She has indeed earned the attention of the wealthy and the well connected. She’s been honored and feted and was even named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. For nearly 40 years, she has spent her days amid homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and poverty. But while she acknowledges her role as a leader against homelessness, she rejects any celebrity. “This is about all of us,” she tells whoever will listen.

Sister Scullion is cofounder and executive director of Project HOME, begun in 1989 as a single emergency winter shelter for homeless men. Today, it is a $30.5 million, multipronged continuum of care aimed at ending chronic homelessness by going at its root causes. It begins with person-to-person appeals to the homeless – many of them addicted or mentally ill – to come inside. There it provides long-term supports – housing, jobs, education, medical care – to keep them from returning to the streets.