Michelle Mooney Profile

Michelle Mooney Profile

After years of service to Common Ground, Deacon Michelle Puzin Mooney stepped down from the Strategy Team in January of 2022. Michelle, of course, continues to be an active leader in the organization, and we thought we’d get to know her even better than we already do. Enjoy this profile.

A fierce and wonderful misfit

“I’ve always felt like a little bit of a misfit. Growing up in Texas, people thought my parents talked funny and looked different. I just wonder If when you’re a little bit of a misfit, it makes you more sensitive to what’s out there. To me, some of the best people in organizing, in politics, in the public sphere are like that. And maybe I could unequivocally say we need a million more mildly misfitted people to go forward. There’s something about being just a little on the outside that helps you see the inside better.” 

On a cold and rainy afternoon at the tired end of April, Michelle Mooney welcomed me into her apartment at St. John’s on the Lake. Almost immediately we started talking about books. Mostly because she has an impressive library, but also because my first question was, “What do you do for fun?”

Her short answer was, “Gardening and reading.” Michelle, as you probably know, does not often give short answers. Inspiring, thoughtful, surprising, funny, profound? Yes. Short … not so much. 

She walked over to the shelves and selected a slim book — “Building the Earth” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, the Jesuit priest, scientist, philosopher, theologian and all-around brilliant guy — and handed it to me. “This is what caused my Dad to rediscover his faith and convert from Catholicism to Episcopalianism,” she said “It made a big, big impact on him.”

[If you’re ever looking for a little inspiration, you could do a lot worse than de Chardin. You’ve probably seen this quote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” One of my favorites is, “The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”] 

During the day, Michelle reads what she calls serious books — mostly theology or politics or a fusion of theology and politics. “Those are my best friends,” she said. 

At night and for fun, Michelle reads mysteries. British mysteries in particular. “I like personality-driven stories that have a lot of development of why these characters do what they do,” she said. “I admire some of the Swedish and Scandinavian writers, too, but they’re so depressing. Probably because there’s no sun all day. It does something to you.” Anyone who has survived Wisconsin weather from roughly November through May can probably relate. 

Most stories don’t really start where we think they do, of course. But they must start somewhere, so let’s begin before the beginning. 

Paris. The early 1920s. Lucien Puzin — a dashing and brilliant young Parisian — had just graduated from one of the most prestigious technical Lycées (high schools) in France. He was on his way to university with a dream of becoming a research scientist when his family called him home. One of his sisters was getting married, and as the oldest son it was his responsibility to help provide the dowry. Familial obligations being what they were, that’s exactly what he did. He shelved his dream and went to work. 

Lucien found a job with two brothers — Conrad and Emile Henry Schlumberger from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. Both were brilliant engineers. Emile was a railroad engineer who helped design the first French tanks for World War I. Conrad was a mining engineer and professor at the École des Mines de Paris. Together they developed a novel way to find valuable deposits of ore and oil.   

Lucien worked in Europe and North Africa where he met his wife. A few years later, as the company grew, he brought his  family across the Atlantic to follow the early oil booms in Venezuela, California, Oklahoma and Texas. 

Michelle Puzin was born in 1942 in the tiny town of Wichita Falls, Texas, into a world that was not as it should be. At the outbreak of World War II, the family faced a decision — stay in Texas or head back to France. Ultimately the family stayed.

“It was both a blessing and a hardship, particularly for my father. My mom had already lost her parents, but she had sisters. When you know your family is in the middle of an occupation and part of your family is Jewish … they don't survive. Jews were rounded up. They took my uncle to a work camp in Germany. One of my relatives was about to be rounded up, and he committed suicide before they could get him. His wife and children were technically Roman Catholic, and he figured they’d be left alone once he was gone. He was right.” 

After the war, the family moved back to France with the idea that they would build a life there. Her father’s family — what was left of them — were mostly working class, and he supported them even after the war. In the end, however, it proved to be too hard. “My brother was how we say in the South, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was not a bright kid.” 

The secondary schools in France — the Lycées — were notoriously tough. “They would’ve made mincemeat out of him.” Without the right grades and the right test scores, her brother would’ve had no real future. And at the time, America was booming, and so was the oil industry. The family returned to the states, and Michelle grew up in the Jim Crow South. Again, the world Michelle found herself in was not as it should be. 

“Race was just … stifling. Even as kids we were aware of it. Everything was totally segregated. The two fountains, the grocery stores … all that stuff.  When I would take the bus sometimes from Austin up to Houston, there was one stop at a little hole in the wall where you could get a hamburger or something. Blacks sat in the back of the bus, and they had to go to the back of the restaurant to get food. I knew it was wrong because we were raised differently.” 

Her parents, outsiders themselves, resisted where they could. Michelle’s mother hired a woman to help cook and clean the house. During the summer, the woman would bring her daughter along, and the two girls would play. But they had to play in the fenced backyard, so no one would see a Black girl and a white girl having fun together. Her father hired the first African-Americans for Schlumberger and promoted them. He took Michelle’s older brother and sister out of a private Episcopal school because they wouldn’t let an African-American student in. It was a quieter kind of resistance. 

Michelle began to get loud in college at the University of Texas at Austin. She started working with mostly Latinos who were working for the rights of migrant workers. At the time there were more laws against the mistreatment of cattle in Texas than there were of these migrant farm workers. “Honestly, if there was an accident in these trucks that took workers around to various farms, they would have all these fatalities because they just packed them up in the back of the truck. They didn’t care.” 

By the time she was in graduate school, America had wandered into the Vietnam War. Michelle, her future ex-husband and many of their friends were involved in demonstrations and protests. “I can remember the FBI at one of the protests. I was pushing my baby in a stroller past one of them, and I realized they were taking pictures of me. I said, ‘If I’m the most dangerous person around here, you guys are really hard up.’ I didn’t get a response.” 

And then the Vietnam War was over. Michelle, her kids and her future ex-husband were living in Milwaukee. He had taken a job as a professor of Economics at UWM, and was putting in a lot of effort and hours chasing tenure. Michelle found herself without a cause. 

“We were looking around trying to figure out what we were going to do next. Were we going to have to go to work or something? This was just way different. So I worked in organizing at a place called ESHAC, the Eastside Housing Action Committee. It was started by a priest and some others. For a while we organized tenants, mostly kids who got screwed over by big landlords.” 

The group fought street expansion on Locust Avenue and won. They ran a neighborhood grocery store as a co-op with the idea to revolutionize the entire grocery store industry — to really stick it to companies like A&P, Kohl’s and Sentry. “Between the peas and carrots we were talking all this wild talk. Of course we hardly had time to put the peas and carrots on the shelf let alone get anybody turned around.” 

The group got out of the grocery store business and got into bringing low-income housing up to code. After the federal money dried up, they tried to start a legal fund — all the free legal services you could ever need for the low, low price of $20 per month. That program started out okay but eventually lost steam. 

These were not good years. Michelle was raising three small kids, and her marriage was falling apart. “When my husband left, I had a six-month old baby, a five-year old and an eight-year old. It was a hard time.” She was also working on her master’s degree.

[Here’s another quote from de Chardin, “It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.” Which? Is a somewhat tepid version of Winston Churchill’s, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Michelle wasn’t exactly going through hell, but she wasn’t having a lot of fun.]

The people of St. Mark’s helped her keep going. It’s how Michelle met her future husband Dick. “He was the kind of guy who would come by and put the storm windows on my house. He would just appear one day with a ladder.” They got to talking. Eventually, they got to marrying, but that was a ways down the road.

St. Mark’s was the true turning point in her life. Michelle had never been without purpose, but the church was where she found a community of people to share her purpose … and in some sense shape it. “Community has been the leitmotif that has run through my entire life. That’s how we get things done. With communities, we can share history, a shared amount of suffering, a shared amount of achievement.” 

A few years after Michelle got her Master’s degree, the Episcopal diocese approached her to start a food program for the homeless and people who needed a meal and a place to go. They had $25,000 she could use for her salary, pay part time staff, and expand the program to other churches. She called it The Gathering, and she had enough money to get started, but she would need to start fundraising. 

“I learned how to write newsletters, and we started getting lists of people and started building a network of people who supported what we did. They gave money. They donated their time. It was a very positive thing for people who had never met a homeless person, never met a family living right on the edge. Because when you stripped off the outside and got to know people … it was transformative.”

Remember the old model of the soup kitchen — line up, get food, eat, leave. The Gathering was different. If people wanted to stay and help out — cooking, serving, washing dishes, cleaning — that was perfectly fine. Encouraged, even. People would see each other pretty much every day. They’d work together and get to know each other … and eventually they’d become friends. The Gathering took off because Michelle wasn’t just feeding people, she was building a community. And the program had a profound impact on her own life.

“I remember one time my daughter was in the hospital and one of the craziest people — we got him disability, which is hard to do with just mental illness, but he was so ready for that — said to my husband, ‘You know, Dick, you ought to be extra nice to your wife because I know that her daughter is in the hospital, and that must be really hard on her.’

“Well that was the most sympathetic thing that anybody said at that time. In an instant I went from a church-ordained person who knew she should love everybody — God loves everybody, and we should, too. But did I remember in my heart of hearts that I should think of these people as my brothers and sisters? All of a sudden, I realized that yeah, they are. This is the reality. Yeah, they were dressed differently. They lived a different life. But they were born a little baby, just like me. They grew up just like me. When you strip everything else away, they were capable of compassion just like me. And it was just an instant transformation … a moment of grace.”

She’d had an epiphany — the political concepts of change and justice were still vitally important, but they begin with God. “We have to have God — whatever God is like, and I’m still not sure what God is like — to see people having equally transcendent worth. In politics, people had worth because we knew we could get ‘em to vote and vote on our side. We didn’t help old people just to help old people. We took old people on a bus because we knew they would pile on these politicians because they were ‘sweet little old ladies’ like me. I understand, and I still do that. But it comes from a different place now. That never left me.” 

And then came Common Ground. I love an origin story, so I’ll get out of the way and let Michelle tell it. 

“So one Sunday I’m walking with my friend Virginia Chapel, and she says, ‘Why don’t you come over to Marquette with me because there’s this thing called Common Ground, and it’s having its founding meeting that day?’ Anyone at Common Ground who knows Virginia Chapel knows you don’t say no to Virginia Chapel. She’ll be after you until … eternity. 

“So I said, ‘Okay, Virginia, I’ll come down there with you.’ I went, and I saw a thousand people show up at Marquette to do this formal start of Common Ground. The mayor had been invited. I think he was in blue jeans and a t-shirt. All these pastors and people were wearing ties and suits. And he later told Bob Connelly, ‘I expected maybe 200 people. I thought this is just another group forming up.’ And when he saw all those people there, and all those people were within institutions. Because Common Ground is an organizer of institutions. We’re an institution of institutions. And I felt this unbelievable hunger to do it again! Because if they had that many people for this founding thing, then they know some things about organizing that I didn’t know.”

According to Michelle, churches don’t always do a lot of justice seeking. They do a lot of charity — and charity is great — but they don’t always feel comfortable in a justice seeking role because it hasn’t been an American tradition. And it’s more difficult. “It was a big priority for me to get my people from St. Mark’s to Common Ground and get them connected. It was exciting because these were things we were doing together. Justice seeking as a community was so powerful, and it has remained that way.” 

One day — maybe six months in — a couple of board members asked Michelle if she wanted to be on their strategy committee. And she said, ‘Sure! I’d love to do that.’” 

Michelle has said, “Sure! I’d love to do that!” for all kinds of projects, including the Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative. And after 11 years, Michelle recently stepped down from the Strategy Committee because, as she put it, “ it’s time for some other people and new perspectives.” 

Of course, she’s not done. Michelle will never be done because there’s always someone who will need her. “I’ve become a defender of old people. Older people become invisible because they aren’t ‘needed’ so much. That’s not true across the board. But I’ve noticed even in churches … if a young couple with children come in as visitors, they get a lot more attention than two little old ladies that come in. I want to change that. I want to convince people that you don’t have to be invisible just because you’ve gotten older.”

[One more de Chardin quote, less profound but very funny: “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.” Fortunately Michelle doesn’t see it that way. ]

And her advice for young organizers and young people in general?

“I don’t think humans are getting better and better. But I do think occasionally we get onto something that makes progress in the world. Kids need to understand that it’s hard, and it’s not going to be given to them. By and large, they have got to do it themselves. And the only way you have any realistic perspective of what goes on in public life is to get involved. I think the idea that being a good citizen is voting every time is a big misconception. There are too many things around us that are not just, and we need bright, exciting young people who can see the world as it should be.

“Democracy depends on politically educated people with some respect for people who don’t share their views. Those divisions really bother me. You see them in the church. You see them in politics. Just because you’re a democracy doesn’t mean you’re here forever. It’s as capable of being overturned as other things. I saw France fall apart to fascism. It’s not hard. It can happen, and it’ll happen again if we don’t value the public arena and get involved with public life. I think we have some real challenges. I’m very encouraged at the local level with organizations like Common Ground which refused to be intimidated by that. I think it’s possible, but it’s going to be a lot of hard work.”

Over the decades, Michelle has worked tirelessly to build the world as it should be … and she was rarely alone. 

“My father was a big inspiration to me — his goodness, his kindness, his intelligence. Bob Connolly has been a big factor in educating me at a time when I needed a lot of education to get back into organizing, back into being effective … and I will always be thankful to him.”

Her second husband Dick played a profound role in her life. “We shared every single thing of value there could be in the world except age. We had almost 20 years of marriage, the best years of my life.”

And then of course there is the community at St. Marks. “There was a whole core group of women and men mostly from my church. It’s not the church per se, it’s the women (and the men) who make up the church that raised me up when I was down low … and never dropped me. And for that, I am eternally grateful.”

And we are eternally grateful for Michelle Mooney. For her fire. Her intelligence and relentless curiosity. Her joy. Her grace. Her sense of humor. Her deep love of community and books and gardens and God. And her desire to build a just world for all of us.