I first arrived at Covenant House, which this year celebrates its fortieth anniversary, just as the dust was settling from the worst scandal to hit an American charity in many years. Truth is, there wasn’t a long line of applicants eager to work at Covenant House back then. In 1989, Covenant House’s founder, Reverend Bruce Ritter, resigned. A report commissioned by Covenant House’s Board of Directors described “cumulative evidence . . . supporting the allegations” and added, “Father Ritter exercised unacceptably poor judgment in his relations with certain residents.” The report, supervised by a former New York City police commissioner, concluded, “[I]f Father Ritter had not resigned, the termination of the relationship between him and Covenant House would have been required.”

With Covenant House’s future hanging in the balance, the Board of Directors hired a new president, a forceful social worker and Roman Catholic nun, to save the day, and that she did. Sister Mary Rose McGeady arrived in 1990, clear-eyed about the task before her: thousands of staff members, volunteers, and donors felt betrayed, curtailing their support of Covenant House just as the economic recession of the early 1990s caused a surge in teen homelessness. She implemented rigorous new standards of transparency and accountability that the state attorney general had insisted on and spent the first several years restoring confidence in the charity. Thanks to her work, after a free-fall in donations in 1990, donations to the agency’s income became stable, then grew again, allowing her to more than double the number of Covenant Houses, in the United States, Canada and Latin America. The agency has reached more than 1.2 million children and youth – and well over half of those kids found safety because Sister Mary Rose decided to make the street children of the Americas the mission of her life.