“I’m just Mary,” says a special volunteer
Mary Dolan’s desire to help others overcomes all barriers
Chances are you’ve seen Mary Dolan around town at one fundraiser or another, one social gathering or another where she likes to be in the thick of things. Chances are you wondered: who is this woman anyway?
For Dolan, life hasn’t always been an easy row to hoe. But blessed with an indomitable spirit, she has managed to grow.
“When I met Mary, Mary walked four feet behind me,” husband Jim said speaking figuratively. “Then I brought her up alongside me. Now she’s four feet ahead of me.”
He is so proud.
Her family’s roots are in Ottawa, but Dolan said she was raised in Port Colborne and calls herself “a Port Colborne girl.” She has lived in Welland for years and says she wouldn’t live anywhere else. She is 76.
Because she is hearing impaired, Dolan wears hearing aids in her ears. She went through a bout with cancer 20 years ago and came out the winner.
“I'm a survivor,” she said during a recent interview.
Dolan lives for community involvement.
She organizes fundraisers for the Kacey-Lynn fund, a charity that bears the name of Kacey-Lynn Rainville, a little Welland girl who died of cancer in 1988 when she was five. Administered through Hope Centre, Dolan said it provides assistance to kids under 19 from low-income families in Niagara.
“This summer we went out and got socks,” she said. “You can’t give out new shoes to people and not have socks.”
She is best known for organizing, promoting and running three fundraisers: a St. Patrick’s Day dance, the Kacey-Lynn Jamboree held annually in June and a Halloween dance. Some might say this work is her raison d’etre.
“I’m the press person for these,” she said, something I recall with fondness from my days at the newspaper. “I make sure the paper knows about them so they can do the good work they do in getting the word out.”
Her motivation for what she does is children. Children are foremost on her mind and in her heart.
“I'm happy to be able to help kids out,” she said. “I just like doing it.
“I feel good when I’m helping. People should get involved in things like this if they’re able, not just sit around.”
Dolan, indefatigable when it comes to doing for others, goes to the soup kitchen at Hope Centre “two or three times” a week to lend a hand, pitching in where needed. She said she also goes to the soup kitchen at Port Cares in Port Colborne once a month to do the same.
But volunteering isn’t something she started doing only recently, she said.
It goes back — more than a couple of decades — to when the Community Resource and Action Centre — later Hope Centre — operated a soup kitchen at All Peoples’ United Church at Chaffey and Hill streets. Dolan was the soup kitchen co-ordinator.
She became so well known amongst clients “people were coming to our house for a loaf of bread or whatever.”
She’s not been one to allow disadvantage get in her way.
For example, Dolan has only a Grade 5 education, her husband said. But she hasn’t let that be an impediment to community interactions.
“She’s going to school now by being involved in all these things and by being with so many different people,” her husband said. “Mary loves talking to people. That's where she gets her education.”
He is her biggest cheerleader without doubt. He said she is gifted in so many ways, not the least of which is “having a way about her in bringing people together.”
Then there’s that other supporter who is in her corner too: “Mary’s got help upstairs,” he said, making sure that I understood this wasn’t a reference to the tenant who lives above them. He said Mary, a faithful churchgoer, is in tight with her God. She attends Rev. Nicholas Deak’s St. John the Baptist Hungarian Greek Catholic Church.
When a collection of angel statuettes on a living room shelf caught my eye, lightheartedly I asked Dolan if there is something angelic in what she has been doing for others all these years.
“I’m nobody special,” she said, a little taken aback by the question.
“I'm just Mary.”
Just Mary.
Chances are now you know a little more about Mary Dolan.