Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight who was savior to those who were forgotten by society. She was an activist, advocate, innovator, a militant, poet, help to all kind, and true Boston treasure. Today's Out Spotlight is the founder of Rosie's Place, Kip Tiernan.

Born in West Haven, Connecticut, Kip Tiernan was 6 months old when her father died and orphaned by age 11 with the death of her mother. She was then raised by her maternal grandmother where she learned during the Great Depression to help others.

Faith was a strong part of her upbringing, although being raised in the Catholic tradition did not mean she had blind faith and acceptance. Attending a Catholic boarding school as a teenager she was expelled for failing math and asking too many difficult moral questions. (More likely the latter) At 16, she took up flying, taking lessons, as well as jazz piano.

Starting out as a newspaper reporter, came to Boston in 1947 to attend the Boston Conservatory on a scholarship for piano, only to be expelled for drinking. She told the Boston Globe in 1988, about her Boston beginnings were more than bumpy. “I was raped once, I was 19. Drunk.’’ The experience as traumatic as it was became an asset rather deterrent in Tiernan's life, especially later when she began working with the women who came to Rosie's Place. She said that it connected her to them. “I’ll tell you one thing. It helps me identify with what some of these women have been through.’’

She "joined Alcoholics Anonymous, learned from recovering street drunks how to stay sober, and became a successful advertising copywriter with her own agency."

For the next twenty years, Kip enjoyed writing mail order catalogs, direct mail and advertisements, including TV and musicals. She received a McGraw/Hill award for a public relations campaign for a corporate insurance company. She also ventured into writing and producing musical reviews.

Another way she used her writing skills was to pen articles for the Catholic Left, which was published in Boston papers. Through her parish, she came in contact with the St. Philip’s/Warwick House, which was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. In 1967, she was asked to help coordinate a press conference at St. Philip’s and soon joined the team's ministry because “poor people need advertising, too.”

The work took her into housing projects, mental institutions, jails and hospitals where she saw first hand the effects of de-institutionalization and the lack of a coherent public policy to address the needs of poor and homeless people.

In the early 70's Tiernan traveled to meet with legendary Catholic activist Dorothy Day, "from whose life she drew inspiration and spiritual sustenance for the decades that lay ahead."

On Easter Sunday 1974, Tiernan founded Rosie’s Place, the first drop-in and emergency shelter for women in the United States, in response to the increasing numbers of women throughout the country. Rosie’s Place provided and continues to provide poor and homeless women with warmth, pots of piping hot coffee, nutritional meals, a safe place to rest from the dangerous streets, and perhaps most comforting - companionship.

Her vision helped Rosie’s Place evolve from simply providing shelter to offering solutions: a drop-in center, extended stay housing, permanent housing, meals, and a multitude of on-site opportunities for our guests.

In addition to founding Rosie's Place, she founded the Boston Food Bank, the Boston Women's Fund, and Healthcare for the Homeless. In 1980, she joined forces with Fran Froehlich and co-founded the Poor People's United Fund, a “spare change” funding source for grass roots community groups involved in issues of homelessness, hunger and access to justice. In 1981 they co-founded Community Works. They went on to work together for over 35 years.

As a team they went on to create programs including Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Finex House, Food for Free, John Leary House, My Sister’s Place, Transition House, the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

Tiernan also help found Victory House for homeless, alcoholic men with nowhere else to turn. Victory House is residential alcoholism treatment program dedicated to taking in anyone who wanted help.

In 1990, she founded the Ethical Policy Institute, "a multi-disciplinary community of people engaged in political analysis, economics and community activism." As a part of the initiative she taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts. Speaking about the mission of the project she said: "We seek justice, not charity and the journey to justice can only be made in the company of others".

She helped people the world labeled “helpless and hopeless,” "In her presence, no one was ever to call the homeless 'helpless and hopeless.' Heaven help you if you did, " one reporter recalled.

Tiernan spent her life at the center of the fight for economic and social justice, advocating and lobbying for affordable and accessible housing, health care, education, jobs, civil rights, and peace.

“If we care enough to take the risk of being human, together we can change the world”.

Tiernan was unique and unmistakably recognizable in one of her trademark hats and khakis, occasionally enjoying a cigar, she blazed her own trail, while still being rooted to her faith, the cross she wore every day was more than a symbol. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, wrote her cross “marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, ‘an angry daughter of Christ… . I find that the cross of Jesus is the radical condemnation of an unjust world. You have to stay with the one crucified or stand with the crucifiers.’ ’’

Kip lost her longtime companion of decades, Edith Nicholson, in the early '90s. Tiernan helped raised Nicholson’s three children, and was grandmother to seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

After losing Nicholson, Tiernan found love again with Donna Pomponio, together for the last 15 years. They were married in 2004.

Kip Tiernan passed away on July 2, 2011, leaving a family, a community, a city, and a world profoundly changed by her presence here on Earth.