Sr Jean Quinn DW Personal Profile
Sister Jean Quinn DW is surely doing for others as Christ did for us, her life’s work being that of uplifting people from homelessness, focusing on the spiritual as much as the material.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Sr Jean says that she comes from as deeply Catholic a background as they come: western Ireland in the 1950’s.
Catholic
“I’m a Catholic sister, a religious sister. I was born in 1949, so I suppose in that environment and where I came from in Sligo, the Church was very important and the like with people.
“As I look back now, I had my Golden Jubilee last year, one of the things that may have stood out for me was ritual. It was that kind of ritual, and the sense of community. The different things we did, we did as a community, and sometimes it was around Church-stuff, but other times, not so – I was in the Legion of Mary too, and that was a place of community, meeting the boys and girls, and making connections and that sort of thing,” she says.
The Legion celebrating its centenary this year, it and its founder’s work with the poor was surely to be carried on by Sr Jean, as she recognised early on that there were people who “lived on the edges”, an experience which was so unlike hers’, she says.
Her mother working closely with disadvantaged families in their area, and Sr Jean encouraged to do the same at a young age by both her mother and the Legion, she saw just how “marginalised” the human experience can be.
“That made me realise about how people really live on the edge of a society. I saw this last year when I went to the Philippines, how people live on the edge of cities and how they live. We can all pass each other and not recognise that,” she says.
As a youth, she was “set on recognising the difference in how I lived – and I’m not saying we lived in any kind of high society – but noticing the difference.”
She joined the Daughters of Wisdom congregation, studying nursing, theology and philosophy, too – all of which would lead her to where she finds herself today. She was just “following Wisdom”, as Sr Jean puts it, referring to one of God’s Old Testament titles, from which her congregation takes its name.
She recalls studying in Milltown Park in Dublin, and “I came out to the gate one day, seeing people homeless. I mean, I’d never seen anything like it. And then somebody said, ‘Do you want to come and visit?’ That really started me back to our founders in 1703. That’s what they did.”
This solidified Sr Jean’s movement in the direction of homeless work, and she went on to work with FOCUS Ireland for 15 years before taking a sabbatical. It was around then that she was approach by religious in Ireland who encouraged her to devote herself more fully to the homeless.
“Before I left, religious were coming to me and said, ‘Would you do something about homelessness? You have the gift’.
“I was working on the ground, but they asked me to set up a place. But then I started thinking about it and dreaming about it, and thinking, ‘That’s something I’d like to do, but how would you do it?’ But if you believe in something, everything just seemed to be handed to me,” she says.
Sr Jean founded Sophia Housing in 1997, the organisation coming up to its 25th anniversary next year.
Describing herself as a “dreamer”, Sr Jean says her vision is not just homes, but support too. Sophia’s approach is “person-centred” and focuses on catering to the person on both a material and personal level – particularly children.
The work I’m doing is political, but it has that spiritual background – it can’t have one without the other”
“I do believe we break the cycle with children… I’ve come to see that we can’t deal with the parents without working with the children,” she says.
It’s exactly this holistic approach that Sr Jean advocates for now at the UN, in her capacity as the Executive Director of UNANIMA, which is an international NGO advocating on behalf of women and children, migrants, refugees, the homeless, the displaced and the environment at a UN level. The work has so far been a great success, according to Sr Jean.
“For the first time in 2020, we got the first resolution in the history of the UN on homelessness. We’re on a second one now, a more extensive one…we’re working with a number of member states, particularly African member states to get one to the General Assembly, and it’s looking very positive, which means that the UN then have to be committed to speaking about homelessness yearly after that, and governments have to give an account of how they’ve progressed it.”
The pandemic has certainly resulted in a “new poor” around the world, Sr Jean says, her fear being that the world will forget about those who were already “living on the edge” in homelessness before it, particularly families.
As such, she’s working hard to bring the “lived experience of homelessness” before the UN – a new experience for the organisation.
“I’ve done that at the UN. I’ve brought a couple of people even from Ireland, Australia, the Fiji islands to speak for themselves at the UN, and it’s quite powerful. At one last year, I was asked to moderate people who had lived experience (of homelessness) and it was the most powerful experience,” she says.
“I was saying to the people at the UN, ‘These are the experienced, the professionals, if you will’.”
Sr Jean remains acutely aware of the necessity of the spiritual behind all of the politics, attending a prayer meeting with some UN colleagues and ensuring that the focus always remains on those experiencing homelessness – the “grassroots”, as she terms it.
It’s this focus that makes the representation of religious groups at the UN so indispensable, she believes.
Grassroots
“We’re Gospel people at the UN. We go to the grassroots people around the world – the former secretary general of the UN, Ban-Ki Moon, told member states before he left to ignore the religious at your peril,” she says.
“The work I’m doing is political, but it has that spiritual background – it can’t have one without the other. I think it’s Pope Francis who said it, that both are needed. We can’t just sit back and do nothing.
“I feel I have more energy now than I ever did before,” she laughs, seeing in that a sign that God may be on their side.