Kip Tiernan

Mary Jane "Kip" Tiernan was born in 1926 in New Haven, Connecticut. She acquired the nickname "Kip" early in childhood from a younger relative for whom she often babysat; she took the name as her own. Tiernan was raised by her maternal grandmother, following the death of both her parents by the time she was eleven. Growing up during the Great Depression, Tiernan learned from her grandmother and mother about caring for the less fortunate, as she provided clothing and bowls of soup to the unemployed men who lined up at their door. Her grandmother also introduced her to music, bringing out Tiernan's artistic talent and love of jazz piano. Raised as a Catholic, Tiernan attended several parochial schools as well as public and boarding schools, but never graduated. She took various college classes in retail management and music, and at age twenty-one she moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1950s, she worked in a variety of public relations and advertising jobs, including copywriting at Breck's of Boston (a mail order house), editorial researcher for Houghton Mifflin in Paris, advertising manager for T.W. Rogers department store, fashion writer for Gilchrist's and Popular Merchandising, and editor of PIONEER insurance trade magazine; she was running her own public relations firm by the mid-1960s. On August 8, 1968, she organized a press meeting at the old St. Philip's Parish in Boston's South End (near the then Boston City Hospital). As a final tribute to mark the closing of the Parish, the event hosted an assemblage of anti-war and civil rights activists, among whom were Daniel Berrigan, Marcos Munos, and members of the Black Panthers and the United Farm Workers. The event became a turning point for Tiernan. She left her successful public relations business and joined Rev. Jack White in a new urban team ministry at the new St. Philip's Parish on Warwick Street (later known as Warwick House). Their mission was to practice a new political theology of justice, not charity. During her fourteen years at Warwick House, Tiernan put her public relations and fundraising skills to work with the Milwaukee 14 Defense Fund and the Camden 28 Defense Community, and for mental health reform for the de-institutionalized. She also spent time at the Catholic Worker shelter run by Dorothy Day in New York City.

In response to an article in the July 1973 Real Paper about homeless women who had no place to go, Tiernan rounded up $250 in donations from friends. She leased an abandoned grocery store (formerly the Rosen's Family Market), and on Easter Sunday 1974, she opened Rosie's Place, the first drop-in emergency shelter for women in the United States. In 1984, Rosie's Place was destroyed by fire, but reopened one year later on the site of the former Warwick House. It has since shifted its focus from simply providing shelter to providing women with the services needed to help "dig themselves out of untenable situations."

In 1979, Tiernan and colleague Fran Froehlich with Georgia Mattison created the Boston Food Pantry, later incorporated as the Boston Food Bank, which provides food to 700 direct service agencies. Tiernan and Froehlich also co-founded the Poor People's United Fund (PPUF) in 1980, providing aid to organizations that serve women in need (e.g., Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Sojourner House, Families and Friends of Prisoners, etc.). From 1988 to 1990, Tiernan and Froehlich were Bunting Fellows at Radcliffe College, where they developed the Ethical Policy Project. As adjunct professors at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1993 through 2002, they taught a class in "Ethics, Moral Principles and Social Policy." Tiernan has also testified before the Massachusetts General Court (state legislature) on behalf of the socially oppressed, and lobbied for social justice, affordable housing, health care, education, jobs, civil rights, etc. She has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for her efforts to aid the poor and oppressed, and in 2010 continues to write and lecture widely.