Rosemarie Reger-Rumsey believed in offering those in need an extravagant welcome.

Reger-Rumsey served as the manager director of Listening House of St. Paul, a drop-in center for the unhoused, for 20 years. The nonprofit organization is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this 12 months.

“She just had uncompromising compassion for the people she served,” said former St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman. “The entire concept of Listening House – to only be present to people who find themselves unheard and unseen – was probably the most amazing thing after I first got to find out about it, and Rosemarie was the right person to steer it.”

Reger-Rumsey died Monday surrounded by relations at her house in St. Paul’s Crocus Hill neighborhood of complications related to lung cancer. She was 72.

Listening Home is a community center where unhoused and disadvantaged adults can spend time throughout the day and evening, take a nap, read a book, do laundry, watch a movie, play cards, pick up mail, get a snack and find fellowship. Staff and volunteers might help individuals with employment applications, chemical-dependency treatment, hygiene, Social Security and other government assistance.

Listening Home is leasing the basement of the First Lutheran Church, positioned at 463 Maria Ave., near Swede Hole Park, but will soon be moving to a brand new everlasting location at the positioning of the previous Red’s Savoy restaurant on East Seventh Street and Lafayette Road.

The development of the brand new constructing and upcoming move, slated for September, couldn’t have happened without Reger-Rumsey’s groundwork, said Molly Jalma, executive director of Listening House since December 2020.

“We’re definitely standing on her shoulders,” Jalma said. “We couldn’t, by any means, be where we’re without delay without all of the service that she provided. We were really hoping she was going to get a probability to see it.”

Listening Home is “all about radical hospitality,” Jalma said. “It began that way, and Rosemarie really continued that legacy of welcoming people in – that there’ll all the time be a spot in St. Paul where we’ll learn people’s names, people will get treated with dignity, and we’ll ask them what they need, and check out and find ways to say ‘Yes.’ That’s her legacy. That’s what Listening Home is, and it’s something that we honor daily.”

Reger-Rumsey’s obituary has been posted at Listening House, and guests have been sharing stories about her this week, Jalma said.

“People speak about her and her belief in them,” she said. “Even just eye contact and remembering their name may be such a transformative experience. She has done that with hundreds of people, and St. Paul is healthier for it, needless to say.”

In an interview with the Pioneer Press in 2015, Reger-Rumsey said Listening House was founded to “serve people who find themselves disadvantaged, lonely or homeless.”

“I overheard someone describe us as Starbucks for the poor,” she said within the interview. “Starbucks’ mission is to encourage and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, one community at a time, and I believed, ‘Wow, we’re not too different.’”

Partnership with police

Reger-Rumsey was instrumental in teaching officers on the St. Paul Police Department concerning the needs of the unhoused, said John Harrington, who served as police chief from 2004 to 2010.

“Rosemarie was the primary person to elucidate homelessness to me,” he said. “Inside a couple of weeks of my becoming chief of police, Rosemarie and I sat down together, and he or she talked me through what homelessness was like in St. Paul. We had already been doing a couple of things, and he or she talked to me about what was effective and what was still needed.”

Reger-Rumsey talked concerning the “three Ps” – people, pets and property – when explaining among the challenges that people who find themselves unsheltered run into, Harrington said.

“Listening House was a spot where the homeless were heard,” he said. “All too often you walk past them, or they’re viewed as largely invisible, people ignore them, walk by them. Rosemarie took the time to hearken to their stories and to not only listen in type of a social-worker way, but to really listen with an enormous heart to try and really understand what was behind the symptom of being unhoused.”

The partnership between the SPPD and Listening House grew out of a probability encounter in January 2004. A police officer noticed the lights on on the Listening House, then positioned at 215 W. Ninth St., at a time when the constructing was normally closed. He stopped by to ensure every thing was OK and introduced himself to Reger-Rumsey. She invited him to come back back on occasions apart from arrests.

The officer and his police partner began stopping by to speak with homeless people, sometimes playing a game of cards or chess if it wasn’t busy — “community policing at its best,” Reger-Rumsey told the Pioneer Press in 2005.

When the Republican National Convention got here to St. Paul in 2008, it was members of the police department who first approached Coleman with their concerns about clients on the Dorothy Day Center and Listening House, Coleman said.

“I feel that’s the best testament to her work,” he said. “They got here they usually said, ‘We’ve got to guard our folks. That was an entire derivative of her work. This work was never about Rosemarie, it was all the time concerning the people and embedding that sense of caring in all who come into contact. I all the time thought it could have been great to place an indication up on Listening House for all of the TV cameras to see (throughout the RNC) that said, ‘That is how St. Paul treats its most vulnerable.’ It was just such an incredible example of true Christian charity, but dignity greater than anything.”

Right person, right time

Reger-Rumsey was the suitable person at the suitable time to steer Listening House, said former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer, a longtime friend and neighbor.

“The qualities that she needed to unite diverse parts of the community, all focused on helping the individuals who really needed it, were remarkable,” he said. “Listening House was all about people listening to them. She named it perfectly.”

Church of the Assumption, where Reger-Rumsey was a longtime member, helped open the primary Listening House in 1983. She learned about a gap on the board while reading the church’s bulletin and decided to use, said Tim Rumsey, her husband.

Reger-Rumsey had previously worked as a pediatric nurse at Minneapolis General Hospital, now Hennepin County Medical Center, where she worked with families in need, and her fellow board member “saw her expertise and interest in serving those folks,” said Rumsey, who founded United Family Practice, a free clinic in St. Paul’s West seventh neighborhood.

Applying to be director when the position became open was the following logical step, he said.

“It was all about relationships,” he said. “She believed in knowing people’s names, and that individuals actually need recognition as fellow human beings and being treated as friends and partnering with the community that they’re a component of. It wasn’t top-down or coming in as saviors or missionaries. We were fellow residents. It was coming in as fellow human beings and neighbors.”

‘Loved a giant, noisy house’

Rosemarie “Rosebud” Reger was born and raised in Robbinsdale. She grew up with six siblings and multiple foster children in the home, and got here from a big Catholic family with “greater than 60 cousins,” said her daughter, Emily Rumsey of Minneapolis.

“They only loved a giant, noisy house,” she said. “That set the stage for mom being director of a homeless shelter afterward. She had an open-door policy at our house growing up. She believed that everybody needs a spot to belong. That was her mission. Hospitality was her gift – professionally and personally.”

Reger attended Ascension School and Robbinsdale Senior High and “dreamed of traveling the world as a flight attendant after graduation,” Emily Rumsey said. “Airlines required a few years of service experience, so she strategically enrolled in nursing school at Anoka Ramsey Community College.”

That call ultimately led her to a lifetime of nursing and social work, Emily Rumsey said.

In 1977, she met Tim Rumsey, a health care provider who grew up in St. Paul, while working at Minneapolis General. “It was a doctor-nurse love story,” Emily Rumsey said. “My dad had pegged mom as someone he desired to marry early on.”

The couple became engaged after three weeks of dating and got married on the Church of the Ascension in Minneapolis. The reception was at Summit House in St. Paul. “My mom all the time said she married into St. Paul,” Emily Rumsey said.

When Reger “told one other doctor that she was going to marry Tim Rumsey, he said, ‘Tim Rumsey? That reprobate?’ and he or she smiled,” she said. “I feel she liked the concept of doing that.

“They’d a extremely excellent relationship. They shared a social-justice mindset and a passion for serving the unhoused. They taught us that we want to look after one another with a nonjudgmental listening love.”

The couple “fought for the underdog in alternative ways,” Emily Rumsey said. “My dad was quiet and respectful, whereas my mom brought the fight to the table. They were an ideal balance in that way. They very much worked together and loved together equally well.”

In a joint letter to the editor of the Pioneer Press in 2003, Reger-Rumsey and Rumsey wrote that “making deep cuts to health, education, safety and public assistance is not any approach to keep Minnesota strong.”

“Ignoring basic human needs diminishes our sense of common decency and makes for meaner neighborhoods that eventually impact every community,” they wrote. “It’s vitally necessary that our elected leaders look beyond the following biennium and anticipate the potential harm of refusing to think about taxes as a part of the answer to this budget crisis.”

Family and “doing exertions” were the things that fueled her, Emily Rumsey said.

“She thought that the very best work best happens by rolling up your sleeves and dealing on the table with other people,” she said. “That was her core approach, and I feel it was why she was so effective.”

Along with her husband Tim and daughter Emily, Reger-Rumsey is survived by daughters Leslie Rumsey and Glynis Rumsey and 4 grandchildren.

Her funeral might be 2 p.m. July 28 at Assumption Church in St. Paul, with visitation one hour prior to the service on the church and from 4-8 p.m. July 27 at O’Halloran and Murphy Funeral Home in St. Paul.