St. Mark Community Center has expanded and adapted its programs for the needy of Dubuque - especially its children - throughout its first 15 years.
Leading that growth the past seven years has been Sister Inez Turnmeyer, OSF.
In an extended interview, Sister Inez discussed her background, the programs at the non-denominational community center and her dreams for St. Mark's. Following are highlights of that conversation.

BC: How did you come to become a sister?
IT: I was taught by the Franciscans. I went to school at Holy Ghost. Then I went IC (Immaculate Conception) Academy at Wahlert High School. I knew the Franciscans. I knew what they stood for, what they did. They're mostly education and nursing. I respected what they did. I looked at them as a group that worked with the poor, that worked with service, that worked with diversity and I said, "Hey, that's for me."

BC: So, did you make that decision at a young age?
IT: I was a junior in high school when Father Chapman, who is now deceased, said to me, "You know, Janet, I think you should go to the retreat at Cedar Falls." I said, "What the heck for?" He just simply said, "I don't know. Just something's telling me to tell you to go." It was during that time in my junior year that I went; I made the retreat. I decided maybe I should try the religious life. When I came home, I put a note on his desk and I said, "Jim, I think maybe this is for me." But I did not tell anybody in high school, like my classmates, until we were graduating. So I had made the decision about a year-and-a-half before that, but I wouldn't let anybody know it because, heck, I wanted to go out and have a good high school time and date and things like that.

BC: A lot of people don't know much about what goes on with your programming at St. Mark Community Center. Could you summarize some of the major programs and projects that you have here?
IT: Our biggest areas are working with at-risk kids and low-income families.
For the at-risk kids, we have the mentoring program, before school and after school, and a junior high mentoring program. That's when we ask individual mentors to work with these children. A lot of these children are scholastically behind, but they're also socially behind. Or they just want somebody who really cares about them. So we do the mentoring program.
We do the fine arts. We do art, music, drama for the kids, because a lot of our parents cannot afford these kinds of classes for the kids. It's good that they get to have the same opportunities. Who knows? Maybe we'll have some future artists or musicians coming out of here.
I do a lot of work with diversity. Talking with the Hispanics in town, the Afro-Americans in town. Probably because my population right now, I'm saying of the kids we have, 200 kids we have, probably 65 percent of them are Afro-American.
We do a lot of work with teens. We're trying to get something going in town. We've been after a teen center for a while. We have 4,700 kids that are junior high age in town; 1,500 of those are right here in my neighborhood. Unless we do something with them, or for them, I'm afraid they're going to fall by the wayside or get into trouble or something like that.
We do literacy programs for families. Parenting programs for families. Just storytelling. Family gatherings. Family nights. Those kinds of things, trying to get the families involved with the kids.
We teach beginning computer classes, beginning Internet classes. The computer would be another big area if you ask for big areas that we work with. I guess we're just here for the people who fall through the cracks at other agencies.
We have succeeded, I think, because we went out into the neighborhood and said to the people, "What are your needs?" What kinds of things do you have? What kinds of things can't you get elsewhere?" We talked to a bunch of agencies to see what they were doing so we're not duplicating services and things like that. Basically they said to us, "We want programs for our kids. We want our kids to have the opportunities." But then people would come and they would want this or that and we're saying, "We can't do everything for everybody. We can't be everything for everybody."
What we tried to do was network with other agencies in town. Right now I work with agencies, schools, churches and things like that. We have probably a network of about 85 different agencies that we work with. Basically, if I can't do it, I know which agency can and you send them out to somebody else.

BC: Have you seen a change in the clientele, the folks who use your services? Have you trended one way or another in terms of age or ethnic background?
IT: Probably the biggest difference right now is the culture background of these people. They're all low-income. They're all needy families. They're all needy kids. They're all families that care about their kids, want something better for their kids. But in the downtown area, we have an influx of Afro-Americans that have moved here. Years ago, when I first came, if I had 5 or 6 here, that would probably be what I would have. Now, if I say I have 65 percent of my kids are Afro-American. A lot of these kids have moved in from Chicago. A lot of these kids are scholastically behind and that's why we're working so closely with the schools in the area right now. I'm saying a year to three years behind from where our kids are here in town.

BC: Is this community center affiliated with any one denomination?
IT: No. We're interfaith here. We work with anybody. Yes, we're an old Lutheran Church. Yes, I'm a Catholic. But no, we don't even consider religion around here. We are very Christian in our dealing with people. Anybody is allowed to come here. We're primarily with the families in the downtown area, but I'm saying that anybody in town can come to some of the other programs that we have.

BC: Where does the center get its money?
IT: I would say private individuals; religious congregations; churches in town, especially the downtown churches; former members of St. Mark's that like what we're doing with the building; some small businesses and a few grants that I'm able to get. It's interesting. When I came, our budget was like at maybe $16,000 a year. Now we're up to about $135,000 a year. So we have to go out and make that $135,000 every year.

BC: I'm sure you keep some records of the number of students you've helped and so on, but behind those numbers there are people. Are there any success stories that come to mind in dealing with people that you've helped, with families?
IT: There's a lot of success stories that I could say. Just the fact like we started out the first year with mentoring 13 students. Now, 15 years later, we're up to about 200 students and we're able to find individual mentors for that many kids. So you've got like about 200 people in town that are involved with us helping kids. I would say the mentoring program is a big success story. Just the number of volunteers that have increased over the years. People get more involved in wanting to do something for somebody else, wanting to give of something that they have, wanting to give their time and talents.
I was going to say the Apple for the Students program. That's the school collection that we do. We started out with about 200 kids. It started out one time at an education meeting when we were talking about, "OK, what are the needs of the kids?" The schools are all involved in my committees. They said, "We have so many kids that come to school without the school supplies that they need." We just looked at each other and said, "Wonder if the town would take to some kind of a collection like that? What if we could do a collection of school supplies?" So we started. This was our sixth year. We're up to over 1,000 kids. Those kinds of things are a success because you know that people in town are getting behind what we're doing down here. People in town want to do something for the kids in town, which I think is great.
You know, Dubuque is kind of known for that - people banding together and getting behind causes and doing things. I think those kinds of things are success stories. Just the idea of like, well maybe because of Sue Riedel, we get a lot of fine arts into our program. We've got the art, the music, the drama. She comes in and does drama with the kids. These kids would never have that opportunity some place else, you know.
We started out mentoring with kids, 1 through 6, because that's what Prescott had down there. Then they went K-2, so then we started working with Prescott. Then Fulton's yelling at us, "Hey, this is the same family, is there any way you can get involved with us, too?" So then we started mentoring K-4. Then we got the junior high kids that had been coming here and now can't come because they're too old. They said, "Sister, we really need a junior high mentoring program." So last year we were able to find a grant out there for a mentoring program and this year we have a junior high mentoring program down at Comiskey. And the good part of that is these are students that need extra attention.

BC: I'm sure that there are days that you probably wonder if it's worth it. Is there a kid that you think of, and I don't need the kid's name, but is there a kid that you can think of on those bad days when you say, "Well, yeah, we were able to help this individual and that's really what makes it worthwhile."
IT: We've got one sixth- grader who came to us as a discipline problem. And we're saying, "Gee, he won't read, he won't sit, he won't do anything we want him to do." It turns out that he couldn't read. He couldn't read, we found out, because he didn't know his ABCs. We almost gave up on this kid. And today, that kid is reading. It tears me up. It's kind of neat. I think our policy around here is not to give up on kids. Yeah, we have bad days. We have bad days, they have bad days, but we need to turn them into good days. I really believe we have more good days around here than bad days.

BC: What are your dreams for this Community Center?
IT: I listed four of them. That Dubuque people and churches pull together and support a teen center. I guess one of my dreams is let's take that building up there on top of the hill, which is the United Methodist Church, let's take that and maybe we can get a bunch of business people in town together that wanted to work with that age group, a bunch of churches that work with that age group, let's do an interfaith teen center for the kids.

BC: You're talking about the Grandview...
IT: Grandview Methodist up there. To me, that's a nice building. The kids are saying they want a place of their own. They go to the Y and places like that, but if you ask Brian Meyer up here at the Boys and Girls Club, he's saying that we don't have kids that stay with us in junior high. The Y says the same thing. So where are the junior high kids? They're running around, getting into trouble, stuff like that. So I would like to see a teen center for the kids in town.
Another dream of mine would be that we would have enough staff to take care of all the needs of the families that come to us.
I also put down that we continue to get the funds that we need to run the place. And I want to find me a "sugar daddy!" (laughs)

BC: Well, I can put your phone number in there.
IT: Put my picture and my phone number there.

BC: We were talking about successes and then I jumped ahead to dreams. Let's go back. What other success stories come to mind?
IT: I was going to say like branching out from two programs to about 40 programs, from working with 13 kids to working with about 16,000 people a year - 200 kids before and after school. Just the numbers that are growing. The more we get out into the community, the more people that know about us, the more people that get involved with us. To me, that's a success story. People are interested in social work. The summer programs, again, we started out just doing some fun things for the kids in the neighborhood. Now, we've branched out. Now our summer program is a scholastic program. We operate through the public schools. This year we have four schools working with us. I think just the idea of more people involved, more people know about us.
One of the highlights is this year, we were recognized by the Education Department. We received a 21st Century grant, which has allowed us to do a whole lot more than we did before.
We're working with the kids before school, at 7 every morning, we're up at Prescott, Audubon and Fulton. That's for those parents who go to work early and have no place to send their kids. We do a breakfast program and then we leave. Then we come down here and do our work down here. Then after school, we have about 200 kids in three buildings. Excuse me. We have three sites. This is a site, downstairs is a site and Audubon is a site. The public school buses the kids here from Prescott and Fulton.

BC: To what degree do you see a connection between literacy problems with children and literacy problems with their parents?
IT: I think it runs in the family. I don't know if that's a good way to express it or not. But sometimes our parents are uneducated, or the parents don't have the resources and they can't give the kids what they want, so therefore the kids are behind. We have some parents that don't care. Like, "Here are my kids, you take care of them." But the majority of the families that we work with - maybe because we demand it - but the kids who come here, the parents get involved with us. "You come in to pick up your kid after mentoring, you read the things that I send home. You send things back to us on time." If we've got discipline problems, we work with the families to solve the discipline problems and things like that. But then again, we've got a whole set of parents that have just moved here that really want something more than they have for their kids. I see the upswing. Parents caring about their kids, want to do things for the kids, want to read with their kids. Want to know what the kids are doing here.

BC: So, you're encouraged by that?
IT: That's another success. Parents are getting more involved - not always to the degree in the ones we want, but we keep after them and pretty soon they learn. They learn if they want their kids here, they have to come and see us.

BC: When you're having a bad day, what is usually the reason? What types of things might get you down in this particular job?
IT: I was going to say that probably one of the things that get me down the most is disrespect by kids for the teachers or kids for one another. I really have a hard time when kids are name-calling and things like that. I guess I just have this high respect for people as individuals and people and I'm saying, I don't like sassy kids. I don't like disrespectful kids. I don't like kids that don't want to do things.
I honestly attribute it, sometimes, to the weather. If we know there's going to be a snowstorm, like we told the other day there's going to be a full moon, those kinds of things show up in kids. So there's a reason why they act.
Our staff does weekly meetings. We say, "OK, what went wrong last week? What are the good things that happened?"
We try to talk to the kids. Maybe something happened at school. Maybe something happened at home. Those kinds of things. It's just hard.

BC: Besides money, does your program have other needs?
IT: We don't have enough mentors. There are kids out there that we wish we could take and can't take because we need more mentors. We can absorb another 10, 15 kids in here, but I need some people that are going to come in and work with these kids.

BC: And if someone wants to be a mentor?
IT: If they want to be a mentor, all they need to do is call my office (563/582-6211). I'll put them in touch with the person in charge of the program.

BC: Do these mentors need to have any special qualifications or background?
IT: First of all, we will do a background check on anybody that works with our kids. We interview everybody that comes here. We want to make sure that your goals are our goals; that you want to work with kids. That you're a caring adult. Then we do an orientation for them.

BC: But these mentors don't need an MA degree in education ...
IT: They just need to want to come, want to serve, like kids and be consistent in coming. You don't need a background. We have a teacher and two associates in each section. So there's enough help if you don't know what to do; the teachers are roaming around, helping everybody. You're going to get on-the-job training.

BC: How much time does mentoring require of an individual?
IT: It depends. If you're here one day, it's an hour and a half. If you're here two days, it's three hours. But for us, it's important that we keep the same mentor with the same child. so they develop a security. They learn how to work with one another. They feel safe with that person.

BC: I'm interested in what observations you have about the direction and the status, if you will, of diversity in Dubuque.
IT: That's a hard question. I think Dubuque has made headway since the '90s when we had our cross-burnings and our little riots and things like that. I don't think Dubuque is where we want it to be yet.
I think people that move to town have a hard time adjusting to Dubuque, because Dubuque is kind of a little cliquish sometimes. I think that they have a problem adjusting to us, and I think we have a problem adjusting to them. Sometimes we expect them to do all the changing, where sometimes I think Dubuque needs to change a little bit, too, to be more accepting.
I guess I feel we've come a ways, we've got a ways to go.

BC: As we wrap up, and I apologize if this is too intrusive a question. But I'll ask it anyway. When you say your prayers, what do you ask for? For yourself? For the program?
IT: One thing I ask for is just strength to carry out the day. I would ask for the wisdom to know what needs to be. I'd ask for patience dealing with the kids and the parents that come to us. I'd ask for help to keep going. My health is not the best. I would just ask that what I do is the right thing, that the Lord directs me to know how to handle the people, the kids, the staff. Give me patience, wisdom, strength, faith.

BC: All of the above.
IT: All of the above.