I always get excited when I pick up a magazine or newspaper and discover something that was written about a place or person from the B-F neighborhood…Sister Johnice from St. Adalbert’s Response to Love Center (RTLC) needs no introduction…the following article is from Western New York Catholic’s 10/2007 publication…Sister is a leader who doesn’t seek the spotlight…the spotlight finds her because of the work she and her staff at the RTLC do…she’s walks the walk and is an inspiration to me and countless others…she embodies the type of selfless leadership the world needs more of…she leads by example.
Response to Love Center leads comunity by example
_____________
By Victoria Kearns, Staff Reporter (WNY CATHOLIC)
It wasn’t because Buffalo is the second poorest city in the country, or that changing East Side demographics are tipping the scales to the area’s neediest. It isn’t because a food pantry is a smart way to embrace systemic change in a rapidly deteriorating economy.
Sister M. Johnice Rzadkiewicz, CSSF, opened the Response to Love Center in 1985 simply because God’s love met her at the door and her reply was to turn an old school into a center to spread that love to the poor, hungry, jobless and hopeless people in the neighborhood.
At the core of the now thriving center which serves 27,000 people annually with a daily food kitchen, monthly food pantry, thrift shop, holiday meals, counseling and crisis services, a veteran’s advocacy program, GED and computer programs, future job training and counseling, is the catalyzing and determined spirituality of a diminutive Felician sister.
“Isn’t it amazing how God uses us,” she said, knowingly from a lifetime of prayer and life experience with God. “We lead by example. We preach and sometimes use words,” Sister Johnice said, quoting St. Francis of Assisi. “It is who we are and not what we do that can touch the heart of one in need.”
