At 8 a.m. on a frigid day in December, Libby Fernandez, R.S.M., rolls her electric tricycle out of an alley next to her home and heads onto the streets of Sacramento, Calif. Every block or two, she stops pedaling and rings her bicycle bell, gently rousing people sleeping in doorways, in tents or atop flattened cardboard boxes, before the police arrive to clear them out.
Sister Libby calls each of them by name, like a mother lovingly nudging her children awake on a school day, except these are grown men and women, some whose hands are covered in grime, some suffering from walking pneumonia. She climbs down from her seat and opens a small wooden cabinet, which an architect friend designed for her, that sits on the back of her trike. Inside are thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate.
“Good morning, Jerry,” she says cheerily to a 60-year-old man lying atop torn cardboard on the sidewalk of 19th Street. Jerry was hit by a car several years ago and still suffers from the trauma, with a bad limp and a damaged eye. His dog, Zadie, was recently taken by the city, but a lawyer from Loaves & Fishes, a local nonprofit program serving unhoused people, is trying to get her back.
“Can I get you something hot to drink today?” asks Sister Libby. “A Cadillac?”
“Yes, please,” he says. Sister Libby fills a cup half with coffee and half with hot chocolate—known on the local streets as a Cadillac—and hands it to him.
“Some new socks? Gloves? A granola bar?” she asks brightly.
“Sure,” says Jerry, smiling. They chat for a while about how much he misses Zadie. As Sister Libby pulls away on her trike, heading to her next stop, Jerry yells after her. “Thank you!”
Sister Libby and a legion of volunteers across the city will hand out scores of granola bars, chocolate, deodorant, hand sanitizer, flashlights and clothing on this 41-degree day to people whom many others will simply ignore, people who have grown more and more invisible in the city despite their rising numbers. In Sacramento County alone there are more than 9,000 unhoused, who often gravitate to the area because of the typically mild weather.
Sister Libby is not alone. From coast to coast, the Sisters of Mercy lead thousands of fellow sisters, lay volunteers and employees—including some formerly unhoused—to fight a growing homelessness problem, which worsens each year due to rising rental prices and the difficulty for the long-term unemployed of finding jobs. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the homeless population in the United States increased 18 percent in 2024, to over 770,000.
The Mercy sisters, founded by Catherine McAuley in 19th-century Ireland, believe strongly that their charism calls them to take action and serve God through helping the poor, sick and marginalized. Sheltering the homeless, in particular, is one of the seven corporal works of mercy. In their early years, the Sisters of Mercy were nicknamed the Walking Sisters, because of their hands-on work on the streets of Dublin.
Sister Libby began her group, Mercy Pedalers, eight years ago, when the idea came to her on a solo retreat at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. She grew up as an Air Force brat, one of seven children. Her family moved to 15 different locations before settling down on the West Coast. Before joining the Sisters of Mercy, she spent seven years in the Air Force herself. She got her master’s degree in social work, joined the order and went on to lead Sacramento Loaves & Fishes for two decades, where she oversaw 15 programs and a 100-person staff feeding, clothing and offering services to the homeless.
Sister Libby is now 65, but she is nowhere near retired. She rides her trike about 90 minutes each day on a six-mile loop, visiting several dozen people and recruiting others to help. She solicits and stores donations, and she organizes 200 volunteers in California, which has the biggest homeless population in the country—nearly 25 percent of the total number nationally. The volunteers work from their bikes, trikes and cars, helping the unhoused survive the cold winter and in every season handing out sustenance and clothing, as well as delivering a kind word and a show of respect.
“You have to get to know them and their stories,” explains Sister Libby of the people she serves, a bike helmet covering her short salt-and-pepper hair. “Then you can build trust and care for them. Everyone has to feel safe. Then the questions become deeper, like ‘How can I help you?’”
On this particular morning, she stops her trike for Renee, a 55-year-old woman who has been on the streets for seven years because of alcoholism. Libby compliments Renee on her new purple walker. “My other one got stolen,” Renee says, exasperated. “I lost everything in it. I fell asleep for too long and somebody just walked off with it.”
While preparing coffee for her, Sister Libby chats with Renee about Renee’s cousin, Ruben, who is also homeless and whom Sister Libby is trying to help get an apartment. “I haven’t seen him in a while,” Renee says. But moments later, several blocks away, Sister Libby spots Ruben wearing a black hooded sweatshirt.
“When you get your place, I’ll pay for your security deposit,” she tells him. “Don’t forget.”
Fellow Sister of Mercy Luz Eugenia Alvarez, an educator who works as one of Sister Libby’s pedalers, keeps coats, shoes and granola bars stocked in her car at all times, pulling over when she sees someone in need. The experience has taught her to be grateful for the roof over her own head, but also not to fear people experiencing homelessness—to see them as fellow human beings worthy of God’s love.
“They look you in the eyes, and that expression of gratitude is hard to describe,” she says. “I feel like I meet Jesus in those people that I meet on the street every day.”
Mercy in Philadelphia
Both Libby and Luz served early in their careers in Philadelphia, crossing paths with Sister Mary Scullion, who has become legendary in the world of those who assist the unhoused and has created a model for the work many others do.
On a freezing day in the City of Brotherly Love, Sister Mary makes the rounds of the housing and community spaces she has created. It seems everyone she passes knows her name, and she theirs. She is known among the people she serves, but also by the woman with the walker named Catherine who is making her way to the apartment Sister Mary helped build, the doorman at the fancy Rittenhouse Hotel where she sometimes parks her car, and the city’s wealthiest, whom she unflinchingly taps for multimillion-dollar donations.
She has met popes and presidents, has received funding from the rock star Jon Bon Jovi and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2009. Sister Mary has also been arrested several times for protesting and handing out sandwiches in places that don’t want her or the homeless hanging around; she has filed lawsuits against the city when neighborhoods tried to stop her efforts and has been called everything from a saint to an “urban terrorist.”
Sister Mary, now 72, started in ministry by working in a soup kitchen as a college student in Philadelphia, which inspired her to spend a week living with the homeless on the streets of the city in 1978 to better understand the people she was serving. Ten years later, she founded Project HOME with her business partner Joan Dawson McConnon. More than 1,000 housing units have been developed by the organization since then, and their staff has now grown to 500 people.
“Mary has this gift of engaging with everyone around her,” says Ms. McConnon, a mother of three and former accountant, whose financial savvy helped make their work possible. “Whether it’s a staff member or a person on the street or John Middleton, who owns the Philadelphia Phillies, Mary lets them know that they matter. She’s focused on them in that moment. They see that she’s a person of integrity willing to deliver on her deep moral convictions.”
Sister Mary and Joan handed the reins of their organization over to new leaders to carry on their mission in early 2025. These days, Sister Mary lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in a residence she founded for young L.G.B.T.Q. people, who often wind up on the streets after they come out to their parents. But her outreach is still wide, and she is still teaching and setting an example for those who are taking up the mantle.
On the morning of my visit in December 2025, Sister Mary starts her day at the Honickman Learning Center Comcast Technology Labs, one of the ministries of Project HOME. The center provides education and employment opportunities for the community through literacy training and access to technology. It is named for the soft drink distributor Harold Honickman and his wife, Lynn, two of the wealthiest people in Philadelphia and friends of Sister Mary, and is located on Judson Street, which had one of the worst crime rates in the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sister Mary lived here during the crack epidemic, her window once shot through with bullet holes. It’s now a beautiful street that also hosts a row of neat brick houses bearing the metal nameplate Project HOME.
From there, Sister Mary puts her sneakers to good use, walking quickly to check in with residents at several affordable residential properties, some located in the most expensive parts of the city. She then moves on to the secondhand clothing store—Project HOMEspun Boutique—which is run by a formerly homeless man named David Brown, who sports a red beard, a white kufi on his head and a white kanzu beneath an embroidered black-and-white vest. His house and work keys and ID card dangle from a lanyard around his neck.
“Before Sister Mary, I was treated like a statistic,” says Mr. Brown, 69, who has been employed and housed by Project HOME for 14 years. “But the Sisters of Mercy would come and sit and talk to me and make me feel like I was loved and I was wanted.”
Now he’s part of their HOME solution. Mr. Brown says: “We give people the H, which is housing. And then the O, which is opportunity, like they gave me with this job, then the M, which is medical, and then the E, education, which I got at the Honickman Center. But it’s all about being willing to do for yourself. And they help give you the will to do that, too. ‘None of us are home until all of us are home,’ that’s Sister Mary’s motto.”
Sister Mary’s next stop is the Hub of Hope drop-in center at Suburban Station across from City Hall, beneath the shadow of the William Penn statue. The Hub, placed underground to attract those living in the subway, offers coffee, washer/dryers, TV and a place to rest away from the cold streets, with van service at the end of the day to a local shelter.
Sister Mary humbly passes the credit on to those who work with her, particularly Joan, who she says is deeply spiritual. “It takes a vast network of people from all walks of life who are all committed to ending homelessness,” says Sister Mary in her Philadelphia accent. “Charism is not only for nuns. It’s alive in our laypeople and donors as well.”
Sister Sue Sanders, president of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, who leads more than 2,200 women religious in North and South America, says that the order has a long history of building housing for the homeless in the United States, starting with the Sisters of Mercy in Omaha, Neb., in the early 1980s. But with fewer vocations to replace those retiring, many of the sisters’ organizations have embraced greater collaboration with the local lay community.
“When you don’t have a ton of people coming up behind you,” says Sister Sue, “you have to find people who are trained, capable leaders to assume elected positions in the congregation. And we have to make sure we maintain the Catholic identity. What we have to do is create a runway to the future for these ministries and prepare people to assume them.”
Sister Mary says that to be successful, her organization also has to listen to those whom they serve. “You learn from the residents what worked, and you continue to tweak it as you go,” she explains, and employing those with “lived experience” is important to their mission.
Monique Taylor, who lived on the streets for a decade with an opioid addiction, now works as a special initiative outreach worker for Project HOME in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, which made national headlines in October when a team of F.B.I. agents and local police swooped in and arrested 33 drug dealers.
Ms. Taylor, 61, a small brunette dressed in ski bibs to protect against the cold, believes law enforcement is not enough to solve the city’s drug problem. She understands how people wind up “using,” back on the streets again and again, without the treatment to deal with the root causes of their problems.
“I know what it’s like to want to go home, but you can’t because this drug don’t let you go nowhere,” says Ms. Taylor, who said she has been clean for 11 years. “I know what it’s like to have that guilt. And how everyone thinks, once an addict, always an addict. But that’s a lie. And I’m living proof.”
If she can get one person off the street a day, into a shelter and into treatment, she’s happy. “What a gift to be able to see the power of God’s grace and mercy,” she says, shaking her head, “because without it, I don’t know where I’d be.”
Mercy in New York
On a cold winter morning, two cars pull up outside Mercy Haven food pantry in the hamlet of Islip Terrace on Long Island, in New York. Among those unloading dozens of boxes of venison, calamari and dried goods from the hatchbacks is a mother named Shanice who spent three years in a homeless shelter and temporarily lost custody of her young daughter.
She now has a job at the pantry and a two-bedroom apartment in supportive housing, which she shares with her daughter, thanks to the staff and the sisters at Mercy Haven.
Mercy Haven is a nonprofit started by two more Sisters of Mercy that is helping unhoused people who struggle with mental illness. By addressing the root causes of homelessness, their team of 109 social workers and staff not only house people but help with medication and health insurance, diagnosis and treatment, education, and employment and job counseling. Programs like Breakthrough, their homeless education outreach center, help identify those in need and provide them with housing and services either through their organization or partner organizations.
The project had its beginnings in the mid-1970s when Pat Griffith, R.S.M., was working as a schoolteacher at St. Patrick School in Bay Shore, Long Island. She and her students would see people with mental illness who were recently released from state hospitals wandering up and down the streets outside the school.
“I didn’t know people with mental illness before that,” explains Sister Pat, 77, a grey-haired woman with glasses and a thick New York accent. “And so I had the same questions the kids had. Why do they talk to themselves? Why aren’t they friendly? Who were these people and how did they wind up here?”
In response, she opened a hospitality center at St. Patrick Parish, which welcomed people off the street and offered them cake, coffee and conversation. This led to the formation of a soup kitchen and eventually to the establishment of Mercy Haven. In 1985, she asked fellow sister Katherine Nolan, R.S.M., a foster care social worker from Queens, to help her find money to purchase a hotel to provide housing and services for the mentally ill.
The two women religious secured $1.6 million in state grants as well as loans from the McAuley Institute and Leviticus Fund to purchase a hotel in Bay Shore. But then delays caused by a fire at the site, as well as community and local political opposition to the project, meant it would be four years until the organization could open its first group residence, which served a dozen people. The home still stands, its rooms still full.
“People didn’t want the mentally ill living on their street,” explains Sister Pat, standing outside the residence on a quiet dead-end block.
“They still don’t,” says Sister Kathy, 82.
There were bomb threats and warnings from neighbors who told them not to walk on the street alone. Because of the bomb scares, the Bay Shore house had to be evacuated two times. Despite these threats, the sisters persevered, and Mercy Haven now owns and operates 38 houses and rents another 40, providing both temporary and permanent shelter for more than 300 people, including families. Their food pantry serves 1,000 people a month.
Sister Pat is about to retire and pass the day-to-day work on to the next generation as represented by a laywoman named Donna Donaghy, a mother of five who has worked with Mercy Haven for four years. Ms. Donaghy has hit the ground running and is already looking for property for a medical respite program that would serve 20 people in need of recuperative care.
“I have big shoes to fill,” says Ms. Donaghy, nodding over at Sister Kathy and Sister Pat. “I’m also not a nun.”
“It’s never too late, honey,” jokes Sister Kathy, touching her shoulder and laughing.
Like Project HOME, Mercy Haven employs people with lived experience of mental illness and homelessness to help them stay on track and to minister to other residents. One such employee is 58-year-old Lisa, a graphic designer with schizophrenia. She said she went undiagnosed for decades, sleeping only two or three hours a night for 30 years.
“I was a workaholic,” explains Lisa, a Long Island native, “which helped me move through life.” But her yearslong struggle left her suicidal, in and out of seven different mental hospitals and eventually homeless.
At Mercy Gardens apartment complex in Central Islip, a Mercy Haven property that opened in April 2022, Lisa has not only found a permanent place to live but also designs flyers for the organization and teaches art to fellow residents as part of their Resident Empowerment and Achievement Program, known as REAP. “I’m very lucky,” she says. “I realize that God loves me after all. I thought he had it in for me.”
Her one-bedroom apartment is the home of an artist. Jazz plays in the living room, purple curtains hang on the window, a drafting table stands in the corner of her bedroom, a disco ball lamp throws circles of light on the ceiling, and a string of red letters over the kitchen cabinets reads LOVE. Downstairs in the communal space are tables for drawing during and after art class and a piano for playing and singing.
“The great thing about Mercy Haven is that they have something happening all the time,” says Lisa. “Isolation is a big part of mental illness, so meeting in that community space with people is really important.”
Sometimes, she says, she worries that her new reality is just a dream and that when she wakes up, she’ll find that she never left the mental hospital. “It’s hard to believe sometimes. All of this. But these really are the best years of my life,” she says, her eyes wide, her smile wider as she looks around at her couch, her tea kettle and the big picture window with the light pouring in. “I’m definitely home.”
⸺
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
This article appears in April 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts