Mary Anne Brown remembers that her son, Cuyler, learned to walk in the Hephzibah Children’s Association kitchen, shortly after she took a job as daycare director of the Oak Park agency. Thirty years later, Brown is eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first grandchild. But she’s also still spending her days at Hephzibah.
Over three decades in Hephzibah’s top job, Brown has led the not-for-profit organization from a daycare-only focus to its current array of interrelated programs, including day care, foster care training and placement, family counseling services, and two group homes for children ages 3-12.
A short-term diagnostic shelter evaluates children traumatized by neglect or abuse and readies them for future placements. A longer-term residence provides extended therapy in a stable environment for those who need it. Both homes are found in the same two-story brick building as Brown’s office, at 946 North Blvd. in Oak Park.
“Mary Anne has always believed she needs to be present where [the children] are present-when they know who you are, and they run in from school to tell you how they did today,” said Hephzibah Foster Care Specialist Davida Williams, who has worked with Brown for more than 27 years. “She believes in good leadership.”
It’s clear Brown knows the kids, and the kids know her. At a recent Christmas party at Oak Park’s Cheney Mansion, children who live at Hephzibah celebrated with siblings in different placements. Many last reunited with their brothers and sisters at Hephzibah’s summer sibling camp, an annual event Brown helped launch in 2003.
Brown is in perpetual motion at the gathering, bending for a hug, putting a hand on a back, steering with a touch, and greeting everyone by name. She calls out compliments at full volume and interjects instructions where needed.
“You look very, very handsome today!”
“I wondered when you’d come!”
“Go get your nametag.”
“Your dress is beautiful!”
“Don’t run, please!”
One well-scrubbed boy in a collared shirt and jacket approaches Brown with concern, having yet to spot his sister. She puts an arm around his shoulder and promises she’ll help him find her, just as the door opens.
“Oh great! She’s here!” Brown says, with the enthusiasm of someone encountering her own long lost relative.
Ex-tomboy, ex-nun
Brown grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, one of six children.
“When I was a little girl, my dad gave me a Christmas present of four dolls in a carriage, in a bassinet,” she recalls. “I was kind of a tomboy, I was into sports … [but] that’s when I thought someday I’d like to take care of lots and lots of babies.”
Brown attended a Catholic high school and boarding school. She became a nun at a teaching convent where she developed an increasing interest in psychology. She left after eight or nine years, believing she could still serve others and better follow her interests within the community.
Brown earned degrees in early childhood education and psychology. While doing graduate work at the University of Iowa, she met her husband, Max Brown. He attended law school at DePaul University, in Chicago.
“When we got married, we moved to Oak Park and thought we would just spend a couple of years in Chicago to get to know the city,” she said. “We just fell in love with it.”
The Browns settled on Cuyler Avenue, which inspired their son’s name. The family later moved to Lake Street in River Forest.
Before coming to Hephzibah, Brown worked as daycare director for the City of Chicago in the south Austin community. Her husband built a legal career at Rush University Medical Center, where he is general counsel.
“He has been the strength behind all of this,” she notes. “He makes dinner every night.”
Varieties of parenting
Cuyler’s arrival was a different, hands-on child care experience.
“I had a hundred theories of child development before I had a child,” she said. “I really thought I knew what parenting was about, and then I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is really hard!'”
She’s grateful for the chance she had to share the experience with other Hephzibah staff.
“Every Friday, we got together. We would talk about what it’s like to parent when you’re also seeing some very difficult parenting situations,” she said. “I began to realize that life goes on, and you have to trust people and then [your] instincts as a parent. You have to let go of some of those terrible fears.”
Brown and her staff get involved in some of the worst possible parenting situations-situations that garner media headlines for their shock value: a five-year-old boy nearly starved to death; a nine-year-old whose brother was thrown from a 14th-story window; 19 kids found living in extreme filth.
How does Brown cope with these kinds of horrors, year after year?
“The good thing is, by the time we hear them, we’re in a position to do something positive,” she said. “I love to see how the kids grow, how they mature and begin to like themselves.”
Brown also enjoys watching staff members develop in their careers. The agency currently employs 144. She is quick to praise their contributions along with those of Hephzibah’s board of directors, volunteers, donors, foster parents, and others who provide support.
“People make extraordinary efforts for these families,” she said. “I feel really great I can see that every day.”
Beneath Brown’s positive outlook is an iron-willed commitment to every child’s best interests, according to Joe Monahan, the Chicago lawyer who has worked with Hephzibah for nearly 20 years and handled many “complicated and emotional and legally interesting cases” with Brown.
“She is a ferocious advocate for children and doesn’t compromise when a child’s rights are at stake,” he said. “On an individual case basis, she is the best friend a child can have. On a macro level, she has been a leader in the child welfare community for many, many years.”
Having a broader impact
Brown was one of 12 federally appointed experts chosen to investigate issues within the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, as part of a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1988. The experts’ findings guided a series of changes in the state child welfare system.
“She’s one of the very few people in the entire state who both the aggressive child advocates that I work with and the state officials and private providers on the other side of the case all agree is fair and knowledgeable,” said Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director of the ACLU of Illinois.
In 2002, Brown stepped up and into another controversial child welfare matter-an investigation into youth conditions at the Des Plaines campus of Maryville Academy, a private, not-for-profit organization that housed hundreds of juvenile wards of the state.
Ronald Davidson, director of the mental health policy program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Psychiatry, got to know Brown during that time. He and his staff initially reviewed conditions at Maryville for DCFS. They encountered problems after documenting “a consistent pattern of violence, sexual assaults, [and] cover-up.”
“Maryville basically kicked us out,” he said, referring to former Maryville executive director Rev. John Smyth.
The ACLU, the Illinois DCFS, Smyth, and the Cook County public guardian subsequently agreed on two monitors-Brown and Art Dykstra, formerly with the Illinois Department of Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities.
Stories of a gang-rape and a tragic suicide at Maryville added pressure to the situation.
“Mary Anne was right in the middle of that and absolutely refused to back down,” said Davidson.
“She was able to go in and report very accurately on what was wrong and what wasn’t wrong,” said Wolf. “It was very courageous. She was threatened personally.”
Brown and Dykstra’s findings ultimately led the state to stop sending wards to Maryville. Leadership and institutional changes followed.
Responding to the community
Within Hephzibah, change has been a constant under Brown’s leadership. Davida Williams recalls the agency’s foster care program being sparked in the early 1980s by a particular family situation. The mother of two girls in Hephzibah’s daycare needed to be hospitalized, and the children had to go live with relatives they didn’t know outside the community.
“I remember Mary Anne standing in the front hall, saying, ‘This is wrong. We need to start a foster care program,'” Williams recalls.
A failed foster care placement-and the realization that some children needed more time and help to be able to return to a family setting-contributed to the genesis of the shelter.
“Every program at Hephzibah has been developed because someone has come to Hephzibah with a need,” said Rudi Vanderburg, Hephzibah’s director of operations and another 30-year veteran of the agency. “Mary Anne is so responsive and creative.”
Brown has received leadership awards from institutions including Concordia, the Oak Park Education Foundation, and the Illinois Humane Society.
“She has one of the premier agencies in child welfare, if not in the country, then certainly in the state,” said Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris.
Rules to live together by
Brown rates Hephzibah an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. She also acknowledges, “The times haven’t all been sunshine.”
She remembered receiving racial threats when she first started at Hephzibah because the daycare program was integrating white and black students from Chicago and Oak Park.
Only a few weeks ago, Hephzibah received a threat from a father who had just bought a gun and was angry about not having care of a child.
“I did call the police and ask for some protection for the agency,” she said.
She also remembers the shelter having a rough start in its first year.
“It was so out of control, it was awful. We decided to close it,” said Brown. “I called a friend of mine who had eight children, and I said to her, ‘How do you do it? What do you do?’ She said, ‘Sit down and write a list of rules-your basic, for-us-to-live-together rules.’ …That changed the whole program.”
Friend Bunny Murphy gives credit for the rules to her husband. He drafted them to help manage their Oak Park family of eight adopted kids. She credits Brown with helping the couple adopt four of those kids and survive the results.
Murphy now has nine grandchildren. She’s called on Brown and Hephzibah many times for help with tutoring and counseling kids through trouble.
“If I have a problem, I call Mary Anne, and she fixes it for me. She really outreaches for everybody,” Murphy noted.
Too much fun to retire
Brown marked her 30th anniversary with Hephzibah last August. She turned 62 on Dec. 25. Vanderburg says Brown gave her five-year notice to Hephzibah’s board of directors seven years ago, sparking secession planning initiatives that continue today and encompass other senior staff.
“I did kind of think of retiring, and then I thought, ‘God, what would I do?'” Brown said. “I don’t frequently say I was wrong, but in that case, I was. I think I have a few good years left in me.”
She would like to see Hephzibah further strengthen its financial position, be able to pay staff more for their efforts, research and share Hephzibah’s unique strengths with other communities, and formalize a Hephzibah alumni group.
University of Illinois student Dan Farley lived at Hephzibah between the ages of 9 and 13 and has been back several times to visit. He remembers taking his first trip out of state, to Disney World in Florida, with Brown and other Hephzibah residents.
“She is one of the genuinely nicest people I know,” he said.
Occasionally visiting family and a condo in Florida seems to be one of Brown’s few indulgences. Searching for something beyond accolades to describe her friend, Murphy calls Brown a “clothes-horse” who loves to shop for scarves, shoes, and jewelry.
Vanderburg estimates Brown is “99% about Hephzibah.”
Brown says she would retire immediately if she ever stopped looking forward to going to work. She clearly has difficulty imagining that scenario.
“Life is too much fun at Hephzibah,” she said.
Writer Linda Downing Miller, an occasional contributor to Wednesday Journal, is a member of Hephzibah Children’s Association’s Oak Park Auxiliary Board.