Former boss, mentor and friend
By
Will Collette
It’s
a great article detailing his life as a favorite son of Westerly and his
60-year history as a Catholic priest.
One
brief mention in the article is to Frank’s service as the first person in the
Providence Catholic Diocese to be named as “Vicar for Community Affairs.”
That’s
how I came to know Frank. The Diocesan Community Affairs office ran out of a
ramshackle abandoned parochial school situated across Smith Street from the
State House where I ended up working from 1974 till late 1979.
I
was hired under the CETA program (Comprehensive
Employment and Training Act), modelled on the Depression-era Works Project
Administration (WPA) to use publicly funded employment to fight the effects of
a deep recession.
Frank finagled as many job slots as he could from then Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci. As I recall, roughly a dozen of us were hired all at once to some vaguely defined jobs that would supposedly teach us skills to land private sector employment.
My job title was “researcher” and I was teamed up with prominent
welfare rights advocate Ray Mitchell who had been working for Frank for several
years prior.
It was great to work for Frank, starting with his insistence that we call him Frank. Ray and I could skip the prayer that opened each weekly staff meeting, smoke cigarettes and crack jokes - Frank was OK with that, though obviously not happy.
He not only listened carefully to every
hare-brained scheme we came up with, but usually let us do them – provided we
did not cause him trouble with then Bishop Louie Gelineau.
Even
if we did cause him trouble, we could always count on him to back us up and
bail us out.
During that period, Ray and I worked with community organizations up and down the state. Technically, we were supposed to monitor and assist group that received church funding under the Campaign for Human Development grant program, but we did a lot more than that.
Frank
let us do what we felt we needed to do. I can’t remember him ever telling me
what to do – almost always, it was Ray and I telling him what we planned to do.
Our
main focus was to expand the ability of low-income people to get help from the
array of public benefits. This involved thorough research, scouting how
programs actually worked in real life, training programs, and publishing lots of
material.
This
was how I first met Sis Brown who was being funded by the Catholic Church as an
organizer for the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Frank assigned me to go down to
the old Long House once a month to give Sis one-on-one training.
Later,
after all the outreach and training, Ray and I started our active involvement
in organizing all the local organizations into a pretty decent coalition to
fight to expand public benefits. Working with RI Legal Services lawyer Ron
Simon, we convened neutral turf meetings of the groups to discuss campaigns
they could do together.
The
first big one was a campaign to force hospitals in Rhode Island to stop suing
their patients and to give low-income patients free or reduced cost care as
hospitals were required to under a post-war federal hospital construction
program.
My
job was to figure out how the program (the Hill-Burton Act) was supposed to
work and then deliver that information to the organizers who then mobilized
low-income patients to go get that free care.
Rhode
Island was the first state in the union to carry out a statewide organizing
campaign to enforce the Hill-Burton Act. More than that, we succeeded. So much
so, that I was asked to go around the country to show other groups what we did
in Rhode Island and to work with public interest advocates in Washington to try
to get a permanent federal policy.
Much
to my amazement, it worked. Now virtually every hospital has a brass plaque in
the lobby and waiting rooms saying that (1) no one will be denied care for lack
of ability to pay and (2) the hospital will provide free or reduced cost care
to those unable to pay.
Frank
let me do all this work, even though it led to my recruitment in 1979 to move
to Washington for a job at the federal Legal Services Corporation.
If
Frank had been a traditional boss, I doubt any of that would have happened.
As
Nancy Burns-Fusaro wrote, Frank was indeed a man of deep principles. As he
fought with the church bureaucracy to try to push the church to get more
engaged in social justice work, I remember celebrating with him one of his
favorite victories. That was getting Bishop Gellineau to include in a public
statement words that Frank lived by: “Charity is no substitute for Justice.”
I’ll
never forget the look on his face when he told us about this.
After
25 years in DC, Cathy and I returned to Rhode Island. Shortly after, I saw a
newspaper article about Frank’s passion during the last 20 or so years of his
life, Providence-Haiti Outreach.
Originally started as an orphanage, the program became a vital conduit for Haiti relief after earthquakes, hurricanes and civil war devastated the country.
I
re-connected with Frank and was pleased to see that he had lost none of his fervor
for justice. Of course, Frank rarely missed a chance to pitch – not that I
needed much pitching – and since then, Cathy and I have happily donated to
Providence-Haiti Outreach’s good work with some of the poorest people in the
Americas. To donate, CLICK
HERE.