Welcome to a brand new episode of Second Chances with Christy Belz, where she welcomes the remarkable Susan Kenney, a member of the Loretto Community Forum and the Loretto Link Board. In her capacity, Susan serves as a vital connector between Loretto Link and the strategic visioning for the Sisters of Loretto and the broader Loretto Community’s future.
Susan, a dedicated member of the Sisters of Loretto, lives out their ideals of justice and peace and remains actively involved as a co member. In her professional capacity, she mentors at Project WISE, where her role encompasses offering counseling, managing group dynamics, and fostering leadership skills, all with the objective of bolstering women, especially those moving from welfare into employment. Additionally, Susan has broadened her scope of work to include advocacy for public policy, collaborating closely with the Women’s Foundation of Colorado.
Throughout the episode, Christy and Susan will delve into the nature of wisdom, the strength that emerges when women come together for transformation and the powerful impact of mentorship. They will also discuss Susan’s formative experiences, the forward moving currents of the Second Vatican Council and her steadfast commitment to advocating for women’s rights.
Tune in as this episode is set to provide you with enlightening perspectives, invigorating motivation and a refreshed sense of intention.
In this episode, you will learn the following:
- The incredible journey of Susan Kenney from a small Midwestern town to a champion of change.
- The impact of mentorship and the power of strong women in shaping future generations.
- Insights into the Sisters of Loretto’s mission and the creation of Loretto Link promoting spirituality and social justice.
- The intertwining of personal growth with community advocacy for a more just society.
- Embracing vulnerability and understanding diverse perspectives for meaningful change.
Visit Susan Kenney’s social media pages
Websites
Learn more about Christy Belz Social Communications:
Website: https://christybelz.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristyBelzCoach/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christybelzcoach/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christybelz
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Christy: Hi, and welcome to Second Chances with Christy Belz’s podcast. I’m your host, Christy Belz. Enjoy our array of talented, open-hearted guests and their thoughtfully curated stories of second chances, life-changing choices, and new perspectives. We are here to empower you on second chances in your life.
00:00:37 Christy: I’ve been so blessed in my life with such remarkable women who have stewarded me, mentored me, taken care of me, and befriended me. Susan Kenney was my former boss and a forever friend and mentor. Sue and I worked together at Project WISE in the early 2000s. Her wisdom and guidance stewarded my early career as a social worker.
00:01:01 Christy: My passion for the empowerment of women was seeded in my early years, working with women with low incomes, making the transition from welfare to work. At Project WISE, we worked on an empowerment model, personal, professional, interpersonal, at all levels working with women was one of the most transformational experiences of my life. I’m so excited for this next guest, Sue Kenney.
00:01:27 Christy: My goodness. I am so excited to start this [next] very long time and who have significantly impacted and empowered me in ways that I can’t even begin to tell you. The next eight podcasts are going to be women that have been in my life with sage wisdom. They are all women who are at least 10 or 15 to 20 years older than I am. That means they’re in their seventies and eighties and they have so much wisdom to bring. I’ve been so blessed to have them in my life.
00:01:57 Christy: And this guest, Susan Kenney. Oh, Susan Kenney. I went to work for Susan Kenney right out of graduate school and in a non-for-profit, we’ll talk about that more in this time. And she was the rock that I needed as I was raising a very young son, moving into a new career in social work and working with a really incredible population of women. So I want you to welcome Susan Kenney to this podcast. Hi, Sue.
00:02:27 Susan: Hi.
00:02:28 Christy: Hi. Oh, it’s so fun to see you always. We have such a pleasure.
00:02:33 Susan: We go ways back.
00:02:34 Christy: We go ways back, don’t we? Yes, and it’s always so fun to connect and be in your energy. And I’m so excited for you to be able to share your wisdom with my audience on this podcast. So I always start my podcast by asking women to share, how did you get to where you are today? What brought you to this place and time? And share a little bit about you.
00:02:58 Susan: Okay, well, thank you. That question is so large. And so–
00:03:02 Christy: It is large.
00:03:02 Susan: What you’ve evoked in me is to take a look, a look back. One of the things about age is we have the gift of great deal of hindsight, some foresight, but a great deal of hindsight.
00:03:17 Christy: Hindsight, yep.
00:03:18 Susan: So I congratulate you for, first of all, for all that you are doing currently in your own life. And then of all things, a podcast.
00:03:28 Christy: Of all things.
00:03:29 Susan: Congratulations on all of them. And in terms of what to share quickly in my review of my life, I would just share, I take the cue from Krista Tippett. I listen to On Being podcasts and she always begins with, so what happened to you spiritually when you began growing up. So I’ll start there. I think that’s also a good question and yours is even broader.
00:03:59 Susan: So I’m from a very small town in the Midwest and grew up in a very traditional Catholic family, a very loving, very generally happy family. And I returned to that small town every single year and still sit on the front porch of the boy next door who bought his parents’ home. So that’s a core place for me. My sister calls it putting gas in her tank. So we go back–
00:04:37 Christy: Wait, what is it?
00:04:37 Susan: We go home and we put gas in our tank. And then we go on to our other lives where we are no longer living there.
00:04:45 Christy: Yes. Remind me again where that’s from. Where are you from?
00:04:48 Susan: [Inaudible] Wisconsin is where–
00:04:50 Christy: Wisconsin, yeah.
00:04:51 Susan: Where I grew up in at 1.5 generations from there.
00:04:55 Christy: Wow. That’s crazy. I love that.
00:04:58 Susan: So lots of people who have passed are there and I visit their graves. Yeah. So that’s the very beginning, a really substantial beginning. And I’m trying to look at it with you, Christy, about what broadened me from there. That’s a small–
00:05:18 Christy: That’s a great question.
00:05:20 Susan: Sheltered and isolated. I had the amazing experience of being a student in Vienna, Austria when I was in college.
00:05:29 Christy: Wow.
00:05:30 Susan: That particularly, that whole experience broadened me to a worldview. In addition to the fact that my grandparents were born in Southern Austria and that widens my viewpoint to realize that I could actually visit pretty close-end relatives who were leading a very different life than I.
00:05:53 Christy: Very, very different life.
00:05:56 Susan: Very, very poor area of southern Austria, and I was privileged to be together with those people. And study, yes, fun, lots of.
00:06:10 Christy: That does not surprise me, Sue Kenney.
00:06:12 Susan: Several of us returned for a 50th anniversary in Vienna. So we gathered together again. We continued to have a great moment and a great reunion in our lives. So we were very blessed with that. And then after college, another significant experience that changed my life was that I joined a volunteer program and I was sent to Pueblo, Colorado, and I am still in Colorado as a result. But at that time, I was a part of, kind of a Catholic progressive movement and it was the time of the Vatican Council, Vatican II. And it made the church very alive, very progressive, very inclusive for me.
00:06:58 Susan: And at that time, I met Sisters of Loretto, who were in a mission neighborhood, setting up a very small place there. And I was two blocks away and that was very influential in my life, because eventually I moved to Denver and eventually I became a Sister of Loretto. And I was a Sister of Loretto for over 25 years. And I am currently a co-member of Loretto. So I never ever actually left the Loretto community from that time when I was just out of college and I can share a little about that later. Then I began working with persons in the 1960s, persons who were not married and pregnant, was a significant juncture in a woman’s life.
00:07:49 Christy: Yeah, particularly in the 1960s.
00:07:51 Susan: Yes, it was at that very time that Colorado was the very first to legislate related to abortion. So all of that was, continuing broadening experience for me.
00:08:03 Christy: Did Colorado go forward or against it?
00:08:06 Susan: Yes, it was the first.
00:08:07 Christy: For abortions.
00:08:07 Susan: First.
00:08:08 Christy: The first? Oh, I did not know that fact.
00:08:11 Susan: I think it was the first state. When somebody [would call in] and say, I was wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m correct about that.
00:08:17 Christy: Well, I wouldn’t doubt your correctness for sure. I did not know that. Fascinating.
00:08:22 Susan: That was really a very, very moving time for me personally and then for women in general. And at that time I did join the Sisters of Loretto. And what was a draw? Why was that a draw? Community, living in community was a very strong draw for me and the strength of community and spirituality and important work in the world. Those combinations really enticed me and still do and I’m a very happy lifelong member of the Loretto community.
00:09:03 Susan: Then I began working mostly in neighborhood work with women, especially women experiencing poverty. So that all led to you and I meeting on the road. You and I met because Jean East, who is another one of your persons that you will interview, Jean East and I began a small nonprofit called, Project WISE, working with women moving from welfare to work mostly in an empowerment model.
00:09:36 Susan: So I guess I would want to include in here, when I’m looking at my life and the importance of something in that and the work, it has to do with empowerment. And your work currently, having to do with empowerment and your use of the empowerment model.
00:10:00 Christy: Yeah. Would you mind describing the empowerment model for our listeners? Because that was such a valuable aspect to my education and transformation.
00:10:10 Susan: What we thought, what we used at the time was a basis of empowerment theory that included personal, working on personal change, personal involvements, interpersonal. How does, who I am relate to others and what’s the significance of relationships in empowering me, in my own empowerment, the relationships, the interpersonal aspect. And the third was turned at the time political, which doesn’t mean politics in that sense.
00:10:52 Susan: What it means is involvement in, my involvement after having done my personal work, my interpersonal involvement, where does that lead me in terms of community involvement, advocacy, and change? So that was, what was, meaning the political term. And we used to say that we were, what we were about in, Project WISE was coupling individual change and social change.
00:11:23 Christy: Yeah.
00:11:23 Susan: And that was what women could get in touch with, in themselves. It’s what already exists, as you well say often, it’s what already exists in people and helping people to realize that.
00:11:40 Christy: That’s right. Realizing their inner power, right? Power leads within people to make those changes and see those things. And then once that power is recognized within, then it is able to be expanded outward into, in little circles and then communities and then in a broader context of our world. Yeah.
00:11:59 Susan: Yeah. Specifically in, Project WISE as you were involved in your own self, specifically that entailed counseling, originally individual counseling. That was that individual change, personal process. So counseling and then having some women, it was risky, join groups, sharing that experience with other women which was very enlightening and empowering. And then moving the third piece, moving all of that toward leadership development.
00:12:33 Christy: Yeah.
00:12:34 Susan: So the counseling, the groups, the leadership development was hopefully that process that culminated in both individual and social change, which our world needs.
00:12:46 Christy: So desperately, needs, indeed. You know, I think back about those days and, you know, we did the individual counseling, we went into organizations that were providing the skills, working skills training, but we went in with supportive services around those women that were making the transition out of the needs based system into more self sufficiency, but they didn’t have the social emotional supports needed to make that transition, the system or macro system, I think really didn’t recognize that.
00:13:15 Christy: I think that was such a beauty of Project WISE in the day is that you and Jean recognized that that need was there and that, with Project WISE we were able to fill that need for the women. And I think even more so when we started to take women into the interpersonal, into their group work and into their leadership development, then we were taken into the systemic. So partnering with the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, for instance, right? Remember we did all that public policy and advocacy work.
00:13:44 Susan: Yes.
00:13:45 Christy: And we train women to be able to speak for themselves and for their community.
00:13:48 Susan: Yes.
00:13:49 Christy: At the legislature.
00:13:50 Susan: Yes.
00:13:51 Christy: We made some significant process, progress in those days. So love, love, love, love, love.
00:13:57 Susan: Yeah. The example of that, that is so clear at that time were often the haves, often male haves would speak for persons who do not have. So there was a–
00:14:11 Christy: We call that the patriarchy.
00:14:13 Susan: That’s right. There was a welfare reform board with the Denver welfare department, for example, and we were able to include some of our leaders on that board so that women themselves could speak to the… for the policies that they thought would be very helpful to them. And that’s true for today. All of this is needing to be activated today, of course, as well. But that was a really helpful moment when people could speak for themselves.
00:14:45 Christy: For sure.
00:14:45 Susan: But not have other people speak for them.
00:14:48 Christy: For them. Absolutely. One of the things, too, I think about is when we were working too on legislature around the TANF benefits and that women who were getting student aid to be able to attend college, they lost their benefits. And I remember advocating fiercely, for the idea that those women need to keep their benefits so they can get an education, so that they can go on to build their own self-sufficiency. And I’m still such a huge proponent of that. I like, just so believe that education is really a form of creating a future for women.
00:15:25 Christy: If you don’t have a future, right? Give them some education and let them. And as a first-generation college student, now that made all the difference for me. And then, yeah. Yeah, so cool. All right, Sue, we need to take a quick break. So we’re gonna take a break. And when we come back, we’re gonna talk to you about some nuggets and some things in your wisdom bucket that you wanna share with our audience.
00:15:54 Christy: This is your host, Christy Belz. Many of the people you meet on my podcast have participated in my online curriculum called Uproot. This 15-week course takes you through my transformational process of understanding our roots, reviewing our path and collecting the tools for life success. I would love to help you on your journey. Learn more about the Uproot course, take my quiz and explore my transformational retreats at Christybelz.com\uproot.
00:16:31 Christy: All right, we’re back with the super amazing, remarkable Susan Kenney, like this woman lights up my heart, fires my brain up too. So Sue, welcome back. So delighted that you’re here. In reflection, I wanted to pick up some things we talked about in the first half of this podcast. And one of them, the sisters Loretto funded and founded Project WISE.
00:16:55 Susan: Yes, thank you for mentioning that. Yes.
00:16:57 Christy: Yeah, they did. I’m like, and I was so in awe of the sisters. So can you just help our audience understand who the Sisters of Loretto are, their values, and their work in the world even today?
00:17:10 Susan: The Sisters of Loretto briefly began in 1812 and was the first American order. In other words, not a religious community founded somewhere in Europe. That’s one thing. And they were primarily a teaching order for all these last couple hundred years. And currently, although the community is getting smaller all the time, the Sisters of Loretto now also include co-members of Loretto and we call it the Loretto Community.
00:17:39 Susan: And the Loretto Community, really the line in terms of mission, is working for justice and acting for peace as the main mission currently. So people express that in a variety of ways. Education, less in formal education and much more in connection to other needed areas today, such as immigration, climate change, especially, and examples of that.
00:18:11 Christy: I remember the stories back in the day, Sue, that the Loretto’s, the Sisters of Loretto’s were the ones when we were dealing with nuclear arsenals and different things would actually go and stand by the gates on those.
00:18:24 Susan: Rocky Flats especially, and other places, which now in our world is becoming again such a significant issue. So we are definitely involved in anti-nuclear efforts as much as possible, as well as seeking alternatives to war and much, much more peaceful alternatives, diplomacy, and not the wars around the world that we are experiencing currently.
00:18:54 Christy: Yeah, yeah.
00:18:56 Susan: We’re in a very hard time.
00:18:59 Christy: A very difficult time. So can anybody become part of the Sisters of Loretto community?
00:19:04 Susan: The Sisters of Loretto have, as I said, vowed sisters and co members. Now, the Sisters of Loretto are becoming much smaller and as well as co members. We have begun an organization called Loretto Link. And Loretto Link is a nonprofit that is not directly attached to the formal Catholic church. So it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has been founded to carry on the values of the Sisters of Loretto and the Loretto community.
00:19:41 Christy: Wow.
00:19:41 Susan: Yeah. Acting for justice, working for peace, and all of those mission activities. So with a thrust that I would say is mission, community and spirituality still as values trying to continue the legacy and the values of the Sisters of Loretto. So that does exist. Jean East, another one of your speakers, and I co-chair that board currently, and everyone is invited to be a member. Yes, it’s non-denominational as well, but it is currently promoting those values of the Loretto community and that is why it does exist. And you can look to LorettoLink.org.
00:20:29 Christy: Social justice and peace, is that right?
00:20:33 Susan: Yes, working for justice and acting for peace as… is the main call with a spiritual dimension of that and community where we are doing a lot of this together.
00:20:48 Christy: Yeah. So excited. So guests, please go to–
00:20:52 Susan: Loretto Link.
00:20:54 Christy: LorettoLink.org, correct?
00:20:57 Susan: Mm-hmm.
00:20:57 Christy: And we’ll put it in the show notes so you’ll be able to see it too. It’s this podcast.
00:21:00 Susan: For more information.
00:21:01 Christy: Yeah. For more information. Good for you guys. And oh my gosh, anywhere Dr. Jean East and Susan Kenney go, we shall follow because there are few women in the world that have the heart and the compassion and the wherewithal to steward us towards these really key issues in our lives right now. So awesome, I’m so glad we got to share that with the audience here, Sue.
00:21:26 Christy: So my podcast is called Second Chances because it’s based on my book, Oh God of Second Chances, Here I Am Again, right? For the gazillionth time. And I talk about you and Jean and my acknowledgements and my time with you working at Project WISE. And I asked you to be on this podcast because there have been so many second chances and opportunities for us to do it again, right? To figure it out and do it again.
00:21:51 Christy: And so I always ask my guests to come up with two or three pieces or pieces of nugget, we’ll call them nuggets that you want to share with my audience, which may be relatively younger. I certainly have a lot of followers of all ages. Wisdom, bring us your sage wisdom, Sue Kenney. Give me two or three nuggets that you want to share with the audience.
00:22:14 Susan: One of the things that you teach a lot and that I’ve, that we all individually together struggled with is being vulnerable. So I would say allow ourselves to be vulnerable, be able to say that we’re sorry, or we don’t know. Everything that I do know, I need to be able to honestly say, I don’t know.
00:22:39 Christy: I don’t know.
00:22:39 Susan: It is okay not to know, and to be vulnerable. That would be one. Another is to join with others, other influencers, look for those, be with those persons who are going to move forward with you, I think.
00:23:00 Christy: Yeah, in, community. Yeah, so idle. And let’s go back to the Stone Center for this is another teaching that I learned with you at Project WISE is that talk about the Stone Center work around women and how women learn.
00:23:15 Susan: Yes, one of the, first, the one book that was influential for me was Women’s Ways of Knowing. And then there’s another book from the Stone Center called Women in Connection. So the point of all of that is that how women learn is in relationship, and women in connection. And at the Stone Center, they would even do really, taught even how to do therapy in the sense of not an individual and me, only me, but in me, in relationship.
00:23:53 Christy: In relationship.
00:23:53 Susan: And the building of relationships is really a women’s strength. And it is how we learn. And we learn from our mistakes as well.
00:24:07 Christy: Yes, we do.
00:24:08 Susan: And negative experiences. So that’s also really key and important.
00:24:14 Christy: Yeah, community. Yes.
00:24:16 Susan: In today’s world, I would say, because of today’s world, I would add, we need to listen to people with whom we disagree. We have a great deal of division, as we all know. And I have to prop my own self to not only stay with persons, always, with whom I am in agreement.
00:24:40 Christy: Yeah.
00:24:41 Susan: But you need to listen and ask more questions and understand the other person’s view and realize I’m not going to be able to change theirs, but know what mine is.
00:24:52 Christy: I love that. I remember one time a friend of mine said she was taking a relationship course and she was telling me about it. And she said, the teacher said, what if you recognize that everybody was right? Like you came to every conversation and every experience with the belief system that everybody’s right, but they’re standing in different places. So their perspective is not the same as your perspective, but their perspective is theirs, and that’s right.
00:25:19 Susan: Yes.
00:25:20 Christy: I thought that was so powerful. Is that what you’re talking about?
00:25:22 Susan: Yes, yes, yes. There is that saying, we are, come to that where we are all right. And then you’ll hear, there could be kernels where it is, where you do agree that it is.
00:25:37 Christy: Yeah.
00:25:37 Susan: But they do have something to teach me.
00:25:39 Christy: Yeah.
00:25:40 Susan: And hopefully I have something to teach as well. Yes.
00:25:43 Christy: Yeah. Do you know where I’m learning that right now, Sue? With my kid.
00:25:48 Susan: Oh, yes.
00:25:48 Christy: Oh my kid, he’s 23, he’s adulting, he’s living large in the world. So I was pregnant, six months pregnant when I started graduate school, by the way, audience.
00:25:58 Susan: Yes.
00:25:58 Christy: So I was a brand new mom when I was working with Sue all those years ago. Oh my gosh, you know, when I stopped and realized that he has a perspective and that I need to honor that. And even if I feel like he’s not honoring mine, I still have to honor the fact that he has a perspective and so I’m really learning it.
00:26:19 Susan: Yes, he’s forming it.
00:26:21 Christy: He’s forming it, yeah. But he knows everything, you know that, right?
00:26:26 Susan: Yeah.
00:26:29 Christy: I love you, Charlie. Oh gosh, well, I love that. So vulnerability, do things collectively, community and listening, to people who we disagree, who might, we might disagree.
00:26:43 Susan: I have just one other, I don’t know how soon we will end, but–
00:26:47 Christy: We have time.
00:26:47 Susan: Being able to let go when it’s time to let go. I have a poem that probably a lot of listeners are familiar with, but I would be glad to share that if we have time.
00:27:00 Christy: Of course. So Sue is an avid just, yes, I want you to read to me. You read to our audience, because you do it so well, and you always have the gift of bringing something meaningful. So yes, please share it. Please share.
00:27:13 Susan: It’s a common poem, in a way, by Mary Oliver, who’s a very prominent poet. And it goes like this, “Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
00:28:30 Christy: I love that. That was so beautiful.
00:28:34 Susan: Well, it’s, it feels timely when she says looking at my whole life, because there’s a lot of letting come. That’s also true. And then there’s a great deal of letting go and all of the grief over the years we have, all of us have times and persons that we are grieving. And then there are also times where we have to let go of the good things as well, or the things that were, it’s time’s up. Yeah.
00:29:09 Christy: Yeah, that touches me, Sue. So you always speak such profound truth and you’ve just been such a light and a brilliant teacher and mentor. And yeah, I just love you so much. And I’m so grateful that you came to spend time with me on this podcast. And that my audience will have you to listen to as long as this podcast exists. Like, I just thank you. Thank you, thank you. I love you so much.
00:29:39 Susan: I think you and I can be an example also of continuing healthy relationships over a long period of time with those of us who do influence each other. It is mutual. Christy Belz has influenced my life. Or believe me, I would not have said yes to a podcast. It is my gratitude for Christy Belz.
00:30:09 Christy: I didn’t quite realize when I buy the belt.
00:30:12 Susan: And all the teaching that you are offering through these. Thank you very much.
00:30:16 Christy: Yes. You’re so welcome. All right. I love you. We’re going to have lunch soon. Okay. We’ll end up. All right. Great, great gratitude. Happy holidays. Take care.
00:30:28 Susan: Bye.
00:30:29 Christy: Bye.
00:30:34 Christy: It is the joy of my life to showcase the voices of people and the messy details of life’s journey. As you have experienced, my guests are thriving with purpose and style, but that does not mean that their life is easy and without challenges. I’ve dedicated my life to you and your journey. Thank you for listening to Second Chances with Christy Belz. Please subscribe and learn more at ChristyBelz.com backslash Second Chances.