Former Community Leader Dies in Absolute Poverty?

I just got around to reading an e-mail a couple days old from a friend of mine who posts over at PhillyBlog. Anyway, he just e-mailed me a link to a post by State Rep. Mark Cohen which I discovered has left me feeling quite meloncholy and a bit haunted feeling for lack of a better description...and I don't even know the subject of his post. I thought I would cross post an excerpt and link:

Philly Blog: Former Logan Community Leader Sally McIntyre Dies In Legislative Office by Mark B. Cohen

... Sally McIntrye. She gave her life to serving others and ultimately lived and died in desperate poverty.

I first met Sally when she was a community leader in the northeastern part of the Logan section of my district: that is to say the area south of Tabor Road and east of Broad Street. She was a fiery leader, mobilized in part by COACT--Community Organizations Acting Together--a foundation funded coalition staffed by Fred Dedrick, now a workforce development specialist, and formed with the goal of getting people mobilized to improve their communities.

COACT worked closely with the Catholic Churches in its area, and Sally, an ex-nun, ex-Catholic school teacher, a frequent church goer, felt greatly encouraged by this development......She took to neighborhood problem solving with gusto and zeal. Whether the issue was zoning, abanoned cars, neighborhood cleansups, or whatever, Sally was there full of passion and facts.

......Month after month, year after year, decade after decade Sally McIntyre became a constant in our 5th Street office located at 5th and Champlost, 6001 N. Broad Street.

One day, she asked if she could volunteer to help. My staff said yes. So she kept coming back, day after day. We tried unsuccessfully to save her home from being torn down, but we could not. Sally's lack of money--she had not had a job outside of being a teaching nun and had never married--meant the house was in such disrepair it was considered unsafe by the people who inspected it. It was not a close question.

We did succeed in getting her placed on Social Security Disability, and getting her admitted to the Medicaid drug program for extremely low income people.

Sally's family was disinclined to do much to help her. Her needs were too great for them to meet. ....We tried and failed to get her into Section 8, but we ran up against the large backlog of Section 8 applications that had precedence.

We got her into a boarding home. But Sally did not like it. On Tuesday, she was back in our legislative office. She was there when the last staff member left. When staff members arrived early on Wednesday morning on May 3l, they found her body laying on a couch.

Funds are being raised to pay for her burial. If you would like to contribute, please call Mable Windham, my office supervisor, at 215-924-0895 or 215-924-3690.....Sally--I should have said in the first post--was 78 when she died. Sister Mary Catherine of Our Lady of Hope Parish was a good friend of Sally's and is coordinating the effort to arrange and pay for her cremation and burial. I will post the details when they are available.

Sally McIntrye is an example of a good person who just slipped through the cracks. Finding a job requires individual initiative, and a level of ego that says I am a good person and I need a life style that is worthy of who I am. Sally was an independent woman who just didn't think about her own needs to an adequate degree. She always felt she was put here to serve others....