Barbara L. Crowley

Barbara L. Crowley, Social Worker, Advocate, and Friend, 11/30/40-1/30/20 The world has lost a champion of the poor and challenged and a wholehearted lover of life. Barb Crowley was born November 30, 1940, and was brought up in a loving family in Stoughton, MA. She entered Maryknoll Sisters, an international Catholic Mission Movement, in 1959, leaving for the larger world in 1970. She received her BA in sociology/psychology from Loyola University in 1968 and her masters of social work in administration and planning from the University of Illinois, both in Chicago. Well before she became a professional social worker Barb was fighting for the rights of the underdog, standing up for residents in Chicago’s first Puerto Rican barrio, which was in turmoil following a riot in the 1960s. She participated in efforts to fight discrimination against Puerto Ricans through the successful development of community organizations. She carried this passion for justice into her career, in the beginning as a medical social worker at the University of Chicago Hospitals and in the end as executive director of the YWCA-Evanston [IL]/North Shore. In between she held leadership positions in community service, child care, and educational organizations, including Mundelein College, Chicago, and the YWCA-Metropolitan Chicago. Whatever group she was working with, she was all in—and always on the side of the workers, the students, and the less fortunate. Barb lost her parents and only sibling when she was still a young woman, but she had a great gift for friendship and found loving family there; many of her friends stayed close throughout her entire adult life and she continued to make new ones wherever she lived. She had little in the way of material possessions but delighted in sharing whatever she had. Barb was fun-loving, compassionate, irreverent, and generous…. the person her close friends called in the middle of the night when there was an emergency and the first to second the motion for any adventure any time (if she hadn’t thought of it herself). Barb believed fervently that it was “better to apologize later than to ask permission first,” and lived her life that way—stubborn, feisty, with a fierce independence her flag, despite her growing blindness from her 30s on. She lived and worked in Chicago for more than 30 years, moving to Bellingham in 2002 after retiring. In Bellingham, true to form, Barb threw herself full-tilt into volunteer work with the blind community, serving as president of the United Blind of Whatcom County and as a member of several committees of the Washington Council of the Blind. She also moved into a leadership position with the Whatcom County Low Vision Support Group, arranging for speakers, bringing in new people from around the county, and collecting and redistributing vision aids and equipment to members. Barb loved “junking,” cats, Baileys Irish cream and Irish music, camping, laughing, the woods, the sea, the poetry of Robert Frost, and especially bonfires. She was forever trying to persuade her friends to head to the beach for a bonfire in the middle of the winter. Alas, they were more timid than she. Barb was a member of the Sacred Heart Church and the Society of St.Vincent de Paul and was a Stephen Minister. Funeral services will be held at Sacred Heart Church, 1110 14th St., at 11 am on Thursday, February 20th, followed by a reception at the church at 12 noon and burial at Bayview Cemetery at 2 pm.