Who is Mary Rabagliati? Here is the first in a series of videos about the life of Mary Rabagliati. At the time, I was 20 years old and found it perplexing to celebrate anything given that, despite many years of efforts, extreme poverty remained a cruel fact of life.
My housemate and fellow Volunteer Corps member, Mary Rabagliati, was exasperated by my question. She said:. All of us should always find something to celebrate: a reason to go out together, or to plan a journey, or just to dance. Like me, Mary joined ATD when she was That was in , just a few years after Joseph Wresinski had first begun recruiting volunteers to join him in living in the emergency housing camp of Noisy-le-Grand, France.
Mary became one of a handful of co-founders who collaborated closely with him for decades, eventually developing an international movement. With her vivacious and brutally frank personality, she inspired many people from all walks of life to get involved.
Tragically, Mary died at the age of 51 in One of her responsibilities with ATD had been publishing books and newsletters that would educate the general public about extreme poverty. And yet the vast majority of what she published was either unsigned or a translation of what Wresinski or others had written in French. In the s, Mary was the first one to develop archives for ATD, so it was thanks to the work she initiated that I was able to find her writing in our archives, now collected at the Joseph Wresinski Archives and Research Centre in Baillet-en-France.
Her letters, reports, and interviews fascinated me. Reading about the year she spent in the United States during the War on Poverty and the civil rights movement helped me to understand how she and Wresinski decided to draw on what they learned there to shape ATD. They were inspired by the passionate engagement of many diverse people and groups β but they were also determined to avoid the pitfall of a lack of cohesive strategy.
