A decade ago, Sister Berta Sailer stood among rambunctious kids inside the day care center she co-founded in the early 1970s to serve Kansas City’s low-income families.

Those 3- and 4-year-olds knew something was up that summer day in 2014. They weren’t in their classrooms, instead gathered for something special. Men in suits had just walked into the center and headed to a back room.

And Sister Berta, the woman many of them loved as a grandmother, stood at a table with papers and special pens laid out. The leader of Missouri is here, she leaned over and told them as her voice spurred them to settle down. He’s going to sign a law, she explained, that’s going to help children all over the state.

“If you become governor one day,” Sailer said, looking into their eyes as she held up the bill then-Gov. Jay Nixon would soon sign, “you can put your name on something like this, too.”

That, right there, was Sister Berta. A champion of children — all children, but especially those who attended Operation Breakthrough in the city’s urban core — telling them they could be whatever they wanted to be.

A Rosary Service will be held for Sailer at 6 p.m. Wednesday, with visitation from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Both will be at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, 1001 E. 52nd St. On Thursday — one week after her death — there will be a Mass of Christian Burial at 6 p.m. at the same church.

In the days since Sailer died, many across Kansas City have shared tributes for the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary nun who envisioned a community where every child and family, no matter where they lived or how much money they had, deserved an opportunity to thrive.

“Words fail me,” one person wrote on the day care center’s Facebook page about Sailer’s death. “She was the feistiest angel and an inspiration to so many for decades.”

Added another: “A visionary if there ever was one.”

Sailer died last Thursday at age 87. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015.

On Operation Breakthrough’s website, people who have crossed her path in her more than five decades of work in Kansas City are sharing how she changed them. How she educated scores of people to have empathy for those with less.

And advocates, leaders and social workers who share her passion of helping others said they believe Sailer’s impact will be felt for years to come.

One example many point to is the “City You Never See” bus tour, a trip through the urban core that Sailer would take state, county and city legislators on to show them what low-income families are up against. She started the tours more than 20 years ago and they continue today.

“I think she believed, with her whole heart, that if she could just show them the hardships families face that they would feel like she feels, like we feel,” said Denise Phillips, a former juvenile prosecutor who had known Sailer for decades. “She just was never going to be satisfied unless she could show, one person at a time, that people are not poor on purpose, that people are not poor because they’re stupid. People are not poor because they’re lazy.”

She believed and wanted to teach the community that circumstances are generally beyond people’s control, Phillips said. And that if you could “give them a leg up,” they would have a much better chance of “being a good parent.”

“I think that if people used Sister Berta’s philosophy with regard to social justice,” Phillips said, “we would live in the kind of world we would like.”

Susie Roling worked alongside Sailer at Operation Breakthrough for years, and the two became like family.

“This woman believed if you were able to sleep at night, your eyes weren’t open because the world is on fire with justice issues,” Roling said. She believed “there’s a have and have not in this city and until we are all one, none of us should rest.”

The equity piece is what drove her each day as she worked with children, Roling said.

“She truly believed that the next president of the United States or the person that was going to cure cancer was here learning and thriving at Operation Breakthrough,” Roling said. “And we had to do everything we could to prepare that child for their life.”

‘Selling a mission’

Sailer and Sister Corita Bussanmas opened Operation Breakthrough in 1971 and watched it grow to serve more than 700 children each weekday.

The center offers family services; educational enrichment; occupational, speech and play therapy; and onsite medical and dental care. It has a small food pantry for families in emergency need, and donated clothes and coats for moms who can’t afford them.

Since the early days, Sister Corita, who died in 2021, was the organizational person who made the business side run. And Sister Berta was the one with a cellphone full of numbers for people — mayors, governors, social service leaders, attorneys and advocates — who could help change the lives of low-income children and families and others in need.

“She rallied support, calling people out and selling the mission to the community,” said Lori Ross, founder and CEO of FosterAdopt Connect and a longtime child advocate in Missouri and Kansas. “And I don’t know anybody that’s ever been more successful in selling a mission than Berta.”

On top of their day jobs, the two nuns adopted four children and fostered at least 70 more.

“It was just like she had a very special mission on this planet,” Phillips said. “And she did not shirk it. She didn’t choose an easy way. She never came home and put her feet up. She came home and did loads of laundry. She came home and drove the kids to lessons.

“She did everything she could do to make sure that kids who had been born into unfortunate circumstances have the same rights as everybody else.”

And when they didn’t, she’d get riled up and stand in their defense. Roling recalled a quote Sailer was known to say: “We save tin cans but throw away children. That does not make any sense.”

When Sailer saw a need, she picked up her phone. If she didn’t know how to solve it, any number of people she’d call would. But if she did have a solution in mind, she’d surely share her idea. And often expect others to help her carry it out.

“Sister Berta would find a family with seven kids that really needed a car because it was hard getting the kids where they needed to go,” Phillips said. “And she would just be relentless. She would find somebody to give the lady a car. I don’t know how she did it.”

Another time, Sailer’s persistence was more personal. Decades ago, she and Sister Corita were fostering a baby whose mother had just killed one of her children. After meeting the baby, it was clear she felt a bond with Phillips.

“This kid just took a shine to me,” Phillips said. “I guess I looked like a safe harbor to her.”

Sailer would tell her that the baby — who would sneak up to Phillips and show her that she was listening to her — didn’t really interact with many people.

“She would say to me, ‘You know, this child likes you,’” Phillips recalled. “And so they talked me into applying to adopt her.”

And when the girl was 9, Phillips adopted a little boy born addicted to heroin that Sister Berta and Sister Corita also were fostering.

“I got two of my greatest blessings from her perseverance,” Phillips said of her daughter, now 27, and son, now 20. “I’m so thankful that Sister Berta had the energy and the fire to just wake up every day with a new half-cracked idea about how to make something better. Never for her.”

Always for children at her day care center, Phillips said, or in the Kansas City community.

‘A call to action’

After the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in December 2012, Sailer knew people in Kansas City felt helpless like she did.

“You sit there and everybody feels bad and nobody can do anything,” Sailer told a Star reporter at the time. “And you want to help, but you realize there’s nothing we really can do.”

Then she told the reporter: “Hey, I have this idea.”

What if, she said, people picked a nonprofit or social service agency that serves children in the Kansas City area? And then, in the name of one of the 20 children who died at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, they could contribute. Give time or money or canned goods, used clothing or a bundle of diapers, she suggested.

The Star called it “Sister Berta’s Challenge,” and for all of 2013, stories were written monthly about nonprofits across the area. They included details on how people could volunteer their time or maybe buy the ingredients for a mom in need to bake her children cakes on their birthdays.

Back in 2013, many hadn’t heard much about the nonprofit HALO — Helping Art Liberate Orphans — which set out in 2005 to fund orphanages in other countries. After “Sister Berta’s Challenge,” leaders back then said people called for even more information. Others sent art supplies or signed up to help during a Monday night art therapy program at a homeless shelter.

“It was that call to action that it really takes all of us in the community,” said Carly Schultze, HALO’s chief program officer who was at the nonprofit during the challenge. “That shared motivation to help others without expecting anything in return and providing those kinds of resources and support to kids who are not receiving them elsewhere.”

That year, people in the community responded and offered help to all of the nonprofits featured. Just like Sister Berta knew they would.

“There are so many needs, and we can fix some of them,” Sailer said in December 2013. “Some, like Sandy Hook, we can’t fix. But we need to show our kids that there are more people who care than don’t care.”

Never minced words

Sailer’s obituary details stories about her adventures before she came to Kansas City in the late 1960s.

As a young nun in 1958, Sailer’s order sent her to Our Lady of Angels School where 92 children had recently died in a fire. That’s where she would learn “on the fly,” according to her obit, how to comfort and teach traumatized children.

She soon met Sister Corita and the two bonded as they operated a club for wayward teens — “gang members who called themselves ‘The West Side Jokers,’” Sailer’s obit said. After confiscating the whiskey flasks that the boys tried to sneak in, the nuns believed their behavior would improve if they had something to do with their time.

“Sister Berta helped them form a softball team and once took them to rent motorcycles,” the obit said, “a move that cemented her reputation as a loose cannon in the parish.”

People in Kansas City embraced her style. And saw something they said they wanted to emulate.

“She was so pure,” Ross said. “There was never a piece of her being that wasn’t fully committed to the value of every single human being she encountered. And that is magic.”

Infectious, too, Ross said.

“It makes everyone around you aspire to do better,” she said. “When you have that perspective of the value of every human being, you don’t kowtow to people in power, you speak truth to people in positions of power and you challenge them to do better.”

No doubt, Sailer wasn’t one who minced her words. And it didn’t matter who she was talking to or who was in the audience.

As a member of the Kansas City Child Abuse Roundtable, she would question leaders in the state about why they weren’t doing more to help children.

“I’d get these people to come to Kansas City to a meeting, and she may or may not offend them with comments like, ‘Well, I don’t know what it is you do down there at the Capitol, but you’re not focusing on this,’” said Debby Howland, a child advocate since 1973 who led the Child Abuse Roundtable for several years. “She just asked very pointed questions and I’m glad she did.”

Because in the end, Howland and others said, Sailer would educate people on what children needed and why.

“It didn’t matter who Sister Berta was addressing, from the governor on down or from the mayor on down in the local setting,” Howland said. “She wanted to make sure that when their discussion was over, they knew exactly where she stood on each issue.

“And, you know, I admired that. And, I mean, I still admire that.”

Ross calls Sailer a hero of hers.

“She’s not going to be forgotten,” Ross said. “I think it’s really important that the legacy she created, that the story be told. And that people learn from her example.”

Howland hopes to see that happen at Operation Breakthrough.

“I hope they’re making an effort every time a philanthropist comes into the picture to tell a short version of their story, about why they are here today,” Howland said. “That they make an effort to say we had an amazing founder, a person that connected with so many people at different levels on behalf of children — and her name was Sister Berta.”