She is sometimes called the Mother Teresa of Milwaukee for her work with the city’s homeless and disenfranchised. Sister MacCanon Brown has dedicated nearly 30 years of her life to this mission, first through Repairers of the Breach and now through the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, an organization in the Amani neighborhood. The eponymous organization is a hive of activity, where we were greeted with warmth and hand sanitizer. MacCanon insists that it’s a collective labor of love, but she is clearly its heart, sought out for advice and direction constantly. The sanctuary occupies a corner of a warehouse on Center Street, the vacant spaces and floors a symbol of Sister’s ambitions to do far more in the 53206 ZIP code, Milwaukee’s most impoverished neighborhood. The former furniture business and storage facility designed by Eschweiler and Eschweiler architects, both grand and pragmatic in that Milwaukee way, could someday be home to a health center, employment services and indoor urban agriculture if she has her way. MacCanon, who grew up in Iowa in a family of Protestant clergy, raised three children and worked as a reporter and a literary artist-in-residence before moving to Milwaukee to pursue an intellectual and creative life. It was her interest in social activist Dorothy Day that inspired a conversion to Catholicism in the `90s and a vow to serve the poor. She later was invited to become an affiliate with the Sisters for Christian Community. She was among the founders of the Repairers of the Breach daytime refuge, working first with the homeless newspaper and then becoming executive director in 1995. She won various awards for her work, but a board dispute boiled over in 2013 and she was terminated in a painful split. The MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary offers meals, clothing, and medical and employment services out of Hephatha Lutheran Church and a “doorway ministry” at the warehouse site. During the COVID-19 pandemic the organization has been distributing face masks as well and held a blessing ceremony for an urban agriculture project.