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A Profile of Dene Peterson The “Burning Soul” Behind ElderSpirit
Within a few minutes of our meeting, I’d discovered a “kindred spirit” in Geraldine Peterson, founder of ElderSpirit Community. Dene and I shared a common bond, having been raised on dairy farms featuring Jersey cows. You don’t get more “kindred” than that! We chose the kitchen table and mugs of coffee for our conversation, in the company of my dog Maggie, an elder spirit in animal form. Dene, a Kentuckian, was born into a large Catholic family of eleven children, an excellent foundation for understanding both family and community. She would use these skills throughout her professional life and into retirement with the spawning of the first elder cohousing project in the U.S. Church was a central feature of the Peterson household. Three Peterson sons, including Dene’s twin, Gerald, became priests, studying at St. Meinrad Seminary from an early age. At 18, Dene chose the Glenmary Sisters, a newly formed and non-traditional religious order whose mission was to serve the rural poor in Appalachia and in cities—such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati—to which these populations migrated to find work. The Glenmary Sisters were young and enthusiastic, drawn to a life of serving the church in new ways in a new age. New ideas and visions that infused the Catholic Church after Vatican II came with new challenges, and the cutting-edge work and practical lifestyle of the Glenmary Sisters proved controversial to the church hierarchy. By age 35, Dene was working in Chicago with the poor in the “Appalachian Ghetto” known as Uptown and simultaneously studying psychology at Loyola University. She described a progression of growth and deeper understanding of those she served: “I went from proselytizing to socializing to humanizing… finally realizing these people did not need to change. They were God’s people just as they were.”
The Glenmary Sisters reached a significant turning point in 1967 when a majority of them, including Dene, left the order. It was a painful but liberating decision for most of the nuns. “For my part,” Dene said, “I realized that God didn’t care if I was a nun.” And so she decided to discover new ways of serving the poor and marginalized populations in Ohio and Michigan, always blazing new trails, to be “first” in each position she undertook. With each new challenge, Dene broke with tradition with ever-higher expectations, goals, and positive outcomes. Working with teen mothers in Ann Arbor, she taught classes entitled: “I Am Lovable and Competent.” She insisted on attainable goals and empowering programs that were always ahead of their time. The last position in her “second career”—running the Newman Center at the University of Michigan where she oversaw a capital campaign of $2.5 million and the first-time hiring of a development officer—allowed Dene to hone her fund-raising skills. “Retirement” for Dene (she was 70 in 1999 when she left the Newman Center) started out reasonably enough with her moving to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where she reconnected with family and friends, many from her days as a Glenmary Sister. When the order had fractured in the 1960s, a large number of the Sisters formed FOCIS (Federation of Communities in Service), an educational and community development organization that worked in many locations in Appalachia. Recognizing their commitment and ground-breaking work, Dene called some of the FOCIS members together and posed this question: “Have you ever thought about retiring together?” Not unlike the rest of the population, most hadn’t given this much thought. From that question—and the collective skills and and hard work of Dene and a committee of FOCIS—has come ElderSpirit, the first elder cohousing community in the U.S. Its residents are committed to mutual support and late-life spirituality, two attributes considered by its founders to be essential for living out a purposeful and meaningful later life. ElderSpirit the vision is now ElderSpirit the reality, located in the beautiful, historic community of Abingdon, Virginia. Currently, 37 residents live there interdependently, offering one another support when needed, sharing responsibilities of the community, taking part in interest groups, while they till the garden of the soul…. together. Dene observes that our lives are lived in a spiral, rather than a straight line—perhaps not what we expected as we began the journey of life. Born with a bright light, a “burning soul,” Dene continues to share that light freely with others.
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Editor's note: Geraldine (Dene) Peterson, profiled by Jan McGilliard in the article below, following a pleasant kitchen-table conversation over morning coffee, is the founder of ElderSpirit and a member of the Second Journey Board of Directors.
