Daughter of Charity Sister Brenda Fritz is known for her deep passion for what she calls systemic change; that passion fuels her ministry as the executive director of
St. Vincent Center for Children and Families in the heart of Evansville’s impoverished Jacobsville community. (Message photo by Rick Jillson)
The energy in Daughters of Charity Sister Brenda Fritz’s voice is unmistakable as she discusses the popular movie Moneyball, which centers on the Oakland Athletics professional baseball team and the unorthodox business approach of its general manager, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt).
“Billy Beane in that movie was so inspiring to me,” said Sister Brenda. “He wasn’t just talking about winning a game or winning a series; he wanted to change the game. I really have a passion for that.”
Sister Brenda’s deep passion for what she calls systemic change fuels her ministry as executive director of St. Vincent Center for Children and Families in the heart of Evansville’s impoverished Jacobsville community. In her five years at the helm of Evansville’s oldest and largest daycare facility, she has broadened the scope of services offered to better address the root causes of poverty while retooling the daycare program and earning accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Located within the same building as the daycare are community partners that work with the St. Vincent’s staff to address poverty in a holistic way. These partners include Head Start, a federally funded program for at-risk children in poverty, and Outreach Ministries, which provides financial assistance and homeless prevention. Echo Housing Corp., which focuses on the development of transitional housing for homeless families and affordable housing for low-income families, is also poised to rent offices in the facility.
“We’ve really been able to develop St. Vincent’s into kind of a center for systemic change because we can now address so many of the root causes of generational poverty: education, especially in the early years, family support, financial support, substance abuse education, Head Start, youth services,” Sister Brenda said. “We now have all of that under one roof.”
This is especially significant when you consider that the majority of the 130 children enrolled at St. Vincent (ranging in age from six months to six years) live in single-parent homes where poverty is a sobering fact of life.
“We subsidize every child at $40 a week, and 90 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced lunch,” said Sister Brenda, who will celebrate her silver jubilee as a Daughter of Charity in January. “But what we provide is so much more than curriculum-based childcare. It really is a comprehensive, family-centered approach to helping people obtain and/or maintain self-sufficiency.”
Tammy Sutton is a St. Vincent Center for Children and Families board member and the board treasurer. She describes Sister Brenda as “very visionary.”
“She gets the big picture and understands that true systemic change is about addressing the whole family,” Sutton said. “She’s very good relationally — she knows every child and what makes them happy and what gets them laughing — but she also knows it takes more than just loving on the child. You have to help people where they are and open their eyes to the things going on inside their four walls, and she is so gifted at that.”
“Sister Brenda brings a lot of energy,” adds Judy Mills, enrollment intake coordinator for St. Vincent’s. “She believes in what we’re doing and in the mission very deeply. She’s very innovative, very community-focused and very collaborative, and I think she’s helping us to focus more on the whole family — not just the child.”
‘We need to instill hope’
To understand Sister Brenda’s deep devotion to the Catholic faith and specifically to serving children in need, it helps to know something of her personal history. Born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she was adopted through Catholic Charities in Toledo, Ohio. Her birth mother asked that she be placed in a Catholic family.
“Catholic Charities and its mission have always been a huge part of my heart,” she explained.
Sister Brenda’s adoptive father was a railroader, and her family moved throughout the Great Lakes region of Northern Ohio and Chicago during her childhood. It was in the Windy City that she encountered the Daughters of Charity and “became bitten by the bug of the Vincentian charism in terms of service of people.”
After graduating from DePaul with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance (she is a classically trained pianist), she went to work at DePaul as a music minister.
“That’s where I got to know the daughters and was inspired,” she said. “They were prayerful women and they worked very hard for people in need, and I also thought they were well balanced in a very healthy sense. Also they just knew how to have fun and relax.”
Sister Brenda’s first assignment as a Daughter of Charity was in social work at Regina Continuing Care Center in Evansville from 1988 to 1994. She then moved back to Chicago where she ministered to the homeless, especially young homeless men, while earning a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University.
“Working with young people who were homeless was a very, very challenging mission for me because of the chronic nature of some of the homelessness,” she explained. “That’s probably what got me interested in systemic change and very interested in studying social work to really begin to focus on the root causes of poverty before people become homeless.”
In 1997, Sister Brenda was asked to become Director of Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Springfield, Ill. She held that position for a decade.
“That was such a gift to me to give back to kids in need when I had been a kid in need myself,” she said.
In 2007 she became executive director of St. Vincent’s, a ministry that allows her to put all of her skills and experience together in service of those in most need of support.
“One of my dreams in Evansville is to combine my administrative skills, my social work skills and my music skills to create a program for people in poverty,” she said. “I want to really use the arts in a therapeutic and an educational way as a social change agent to break the cycle of poverty and help bring hope to the Jacobsville area that is so infested with methamphetamines, vandalism and other sorts of crime.
“We need to instill hope, and I’m glad that St. Vincent’s can be an anchor in this community. It’s about changing the game — not just providing childcare that’s safe and quality while a parent works. That’s part of it. But it really is empowering people to change their lives.”
Sister Brenda offered an illustration of the power of systemic change at work. She said she received a call several months ago from a caseworker in Evansville who, from personal experience, knew about the dedication of St. Vincent’s teachers and the high quality of the kindergarten readiness curriculum.
“She said she was working with a little boy, 4 years old, and she knew that kindergarten would eat him alive, that he needed a structured pre-school experience to ensure he was ready to start kindergarten and ready to learn, knowing that once a child in poverty starts school behind, it’s very difficult for them to catch up,” said Sister Brenda.
Recognizing an opportunity to make a difference, the St. Vincent’s Board and staff came together and approached current and potential donors to subsidize the child’s tuition for the summer.
“He has made tremendous strides,” said Sister Brenda with a smile. “He now knows his numbers and his letters, and his communication and social skills and following directions have all improved tremendously. We can continue caring for and educating him for another year if we can just find the tuition subsidy for him. We have all fallen in love with him!”
Recognizing the body of Christ
Sister Brenda credits her community life for helping her stay motivated and focused. She said she comes together several times a week with her fellow sisters for apostolic reflection.
“We actually share with one another where we encountered Christ that day in our ministry,” she explained.
She says the support of her fellow sisters, as well as a deep prayer life, enable her to see the body of Christ in even the most difficult circumstances.
“When a teacher is in tears over not knowing how to handle a problem with a child, when a child is in tears with their mother being in jail, when a parent is just using drugs and being very belligerent, it is the grace of God to believe that at that moment it is the incarnation of Christ right there in front of you.”
Sister Brenda said she also draws strength when St. Vincent’s alumni visit her. She said she has very few records of families who came through the daycare program prior to the current era of electronic recordkeeping, and she would love to meet older alumni and learn about their successes. “I know St. Vincent’s made a difference in the lives of a lot of working