Longtime shelter worker leaves legacy of compassion
Program manager who started as volunteer retires after 32 years of helping homeless at St. Elizabeth
Even as a child, Maria Lopez felt compelled to help others in need. She remembers consoling tearful classmates in kindergarten. Once, she said, she cut down a tree in her grandfather’s yard and adorned it with ornaments as a holiday gift for indigent neighbors.
“Oh boy, did I hear from my grandfather about that tree,” she said.
Lopez, 66, the longest-serving employee of St. Elizabeth Shelters and Supportive Housing, was honored Saturday for her 32 years of working on the front lines of one of Santa Fe’s biggest challenges. She started as a volunteer when the homeless shelter opened in 1986.
Reflecting on her decades of work with the homeless community — the difficulties and rewards, both personal and communitywide — she said, without a tinge of melodrama, “I would say it was my destiny.”
She retired earlier this year as the longtime program manager at the St. Elizabeth men’s shelter on Alarid Street, near the Railyard.
“I don’t ever remember St. Elizabeth without Maria,” said Sam Baca, president of the organization’s board of directors, during a celebration Saturday that drew dozens of
Lopez’s family members, friends, co-workers, and current and former shelter residents.
“She’s been the heart and soul of the program. … She’s definitely made a mark and influenced so many people’s lives. So much love and caring.”
Executive Director Edward Archuleta described Lopez as an outgoing and loving person with a great sense of humor.
“The homeless just absolutely adored her,” Archuleta said. “She treated them like her children.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. Larry Montoya, 59, a former men’s shelter resident who’s known Lopez for 18 years, said, “She is just like my mother. I learned quite a lot from her. I’ll always respect her like my mother.”
When he began staying at the shelter nearly two decades ago, he asked Lopez if he could cook breakfast for residents, Montoya said, and she agreed to turn over the kitchen in the mornings. “Everyone said the food was fine,” he said.
About eight years ago, Montoya moved into one of St. Elizabeth’s permanent housing facilities, Casa Cerrillos. The nonprofit operates three such facilities, along with the men’s shelter and a separate shelter for women and children.
Montoya’s story was one of Lopez’s successes.
After three decades fighting homelessness, her perspective is both realistic and hopeful.
“I don’t know if there’ll ever be an end to it,” she said, “but I know that it can be a better world, if we all just give a little.”
She acknowledged Santa Fe’s homeless population continues to grow, especially among seniors.
Services for people in the homeless community have increased over the years with help from the city of Santa Fe, she said — though, it’s “just a drop in the bucket.” Health care and mental health services have improved, she added, citing the nonprofit La Familia Medical Center’s Health Care for the Homeless program, which provides outpatient medical and dental care.
She credited a generous community of donors and volunteers in Santa Fe.
Still, she said, far more needs to be done to address behavioral health needs — especially substance abuse — that contribute to the crisis.
St. Elizabeth’s first shelter was on Don Gaspar Avenue. It opened in December 1986 in response to a growing need in the city. Lopez, who’d had some experience working at the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families and at a rape crisis center, began volunteering there with family members, she said. They cooked dinners for shelter residents on Saturdays for a decade.
Lopez also became the shelter’s volunteer coordinator, training hundreds of interns, many who lived on-site. She went on to become an assistant director and then program manager.
Lawrence Sena, 42, a former shelter employee who started as one of Lopez’s interns, spent years under her mentorship, first as a case manager and then program manager at the women’s shelter, Casa Familia.
“Maria was always the person that I could talk to because she was just so down to earth and had so much compassion,” Sena said. “Just hearing stories, working with her, seeing her interact with the population that we serve, everyone knowing her. … It was really something magical to witness and to be a part of.”
Shelter work can be intense, said Sena, who recently left the organization to take a job as a case manager at a local medical clinic.
He remains in awe, he said, of Lopez’s dedication: “She’s a very special person.”
Residents and co-workers alike praised Lopez’s sense of compassion — something she said was instilled at an early age.
She grew up with five brothers and four sisters in an east-side home on Apodaca Hill, off Canyon Road. She recalled her first days in a local school, where she had five older siblings enrolled. She was comfortable in the classroom, but many of the children were “screaming and hollering for their mamas,” she said.
“I had to make them feel better,” she said, “so I’d say, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ ”
And then there was the Christmas tree incident. She was 9 or 10 at the time, Lopez said.
She had discovered her neighbors couldn’t afford a tree or presents for the holidays, she said: “They had little kids. And how could they not have a Christmas tree?”
Well, she found one for them in her grandfather’s backyard. “I stuck it in a bucket with rocks,” she said, “and I decorated it.”
Lopez is a mother of two adult children, a daughter and a son who works as a data manager at St. Elizabeth. In retirement, she said, she hopes to spend more time with her children as well as her siblings.
She’s leaving her position at the men’s shelter to Jake Fulmer, a St. Elizabeth employee who had decided to return to his native Tennessee last year but returned to the shelter after just three months.
“I was waiting for the right person to take over,” Lopez said of her decision to retire.
She might visit the shelter from time to time, but not too often. “I’m a very controlling person, and this is my baby,” she said with a laugh.
Lopez said one of the most rewarding parts of her work was what she learned from the people she served, her “friends who live on the street.”
“I’ve learned to be grateful,” Lopez said. “I never knew what gratitude was until I started working here. It’s humbled me. It’s made me a better person.”