It’s Monday morning and Donna Finneran is already doing what she does most days of the week — passing out Brian Bags from the trunk of her car to homeless people on the streets.
“Hey … Hi. How are you?” she calls out in her upbeat, Bronx accent. “Can I give you a Brian Bag?” she asks as she jumps out of her car to hand out a care package.
More than a ministry, this is Donna’s passion, which she started two years ago to honor her late twin brother, Brian O’Connell, who died homeless and alone in 2016.
Today is just one of many stops she makes in towns throughout Connecticut to help the homeless. And when she’s not passing out bags, she’s collecting and packaging items with a small army of volunteers, promoting her project, stocking the garage of her Watertown home, making presentations, or just talking about her foundation, the Brian O’Connell Homeless Project.
“I do this out of my heart,” she says, “to change one person a day to look at a homeless person in a different way, and to help the homeless … knowing that it could be someone’s brother, sister or family member out there.”
Donna, who attends Mass first thing every morning, also finds time to weave in three rosaries as the day progresses.
“That’s why I started this program, to give them water, and food and clean underwear … to give them hope and to encourage others to have compassion for people,” she says.
“I try to encourage everyone to treat a homeless person with love and compassion, to stop and say hello,” she says. “We are not to judge them or anyone, especially those who are down on their luck.” After all, she adds, “Jesus was born homeless.”
Along the way, she has enlisted hundreds of people, mostly in communities and churches throughout the Archdiocese of Hartford, to help her collect, bag and distribute the care packages filled with about $14 worth of toiletries, snacks, a first aid kit and even gift cards for food.
A phone call breaks the isolation
For Donna, the care packages are a way to honor and remember her brother, the tragedy of his death and the impact it has left on her.
She explains that Brian suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after he “saw people jump to their deaths” from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 tragedy when he was working in New York City. “It gave him PTSD,” she says.
For a time, Brian lived with her and her family, but on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the PTSD was triggered again when he watched the annual memorial service and heard the bells ringing as names of the victims were read.
As it turns out, his body was found on Oct. 20, 2016, by a parishioner from the Church of the Assumption in Ansonia who notified police and also told his childhood friend and then pastor, Father James Sullivan. (Father Sullivan has since been reassigned to the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury.) However, the state medical examiner was unable to release the body until January, pending an investigation that included a DNA analysis to make a positive identification.
For Donna, the wait was unbearable, and she began to have thoughts of suicide.
“I was in a very deep depression,” admits the wife and mother of three adult children. That is until she received a Christmas miracle.
It was Dec. 22. “I was so depressed, I didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. Her husband, Walter, was away on a retreat. So she sat down to write a suicide letter.
But then the phone rang. “I heard a voice identifying himself as Father Sullivan, and he was asking me if he could celebrate the funeral Mass of my brother,” she says, still amazed by the coincidence. “It was a priest calling me. Usually, when a family member dies, we call a priest; but here was a priest calling me.”
Father Sullivan “prevented me from taking my life,” she says, noting that he continued to stay in touch with her through the holidays. “Father Sullivan saved my heart and soul, but also my life.”
After Christmas, the priest invited the Finnerans to a Sunday Mass, and from the pulpit he asked parishioners if they would ever attend the funeral of a homeless man. Virtually every hand went up. To Donna’s amazement, nearly 350 people attended her brother’s funeral — one of the largest ever held in the parish.
A great idea is born
A few weeks later, the idea for Brian Bags was conceived. The Finnerans, who live in Watertown where they once owned a heating and air conditioning business, joined the parish. And parishioners, including the parish’s Knights of Columbus council, quickly volunteered to help launch the project, giving out Brian Bags to the homeless by Palm Sunday of 2017.
Since then, she has given out 4,000 Brian Bags with items packaged in a clear, gallon-size bag — tuna fish, cookies, crackers, socks, deodorant, Wet Ones, ChapStick, dental floss, Slim Jims, toothbrush and toothpaste. Plus gift cards for KFC, McDonald’s, Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Each bag also includes a card that reads: “Let this little bag remind you that there are people who care about you and that there is always hope. Have a blessed day!”
In addition to donations from parishioners at the Church of the Assumption, which packaged 1,000 bags last year alone, support has come from St. Dominic’s in Southington, which donated 300 bags, while students at St. Hedwig School (now closed) packaged 75 bags.
“St. John of the Cross Parish in Middlebury filled my car five times with donations,” says Donna. “I couldn’t even see out the window. And the school at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Waterbury had a big collection the week of Christmas. It took me two hours to get the things out of the car.”
Other parishes helping out include St. Basil the Great in Wolcott, St. Thomas the Apostle in Oxford, St. John Paul the Great in Torrington, St. Nicholas in Seymour and St. Mary Magdalen in Oakville, as well as other local churches and community groups. Knights of Columbus councils have also donated and helped her assemble bags, while ladies at the Naugatuck and Oxford senior centers have crocheted 200 mats that they inventively make using “plarn,” or plastic strips cut from grocery bags.
“The mats protect homeless people who sleep on the ground,” explains Donna. And they are lightweight, so they can carry them easily during the day.”
Since an article about Brian Bags appeared in the Knights of Columbus Columbia magazine, she has received calls from councils in six states from Alabama to New Jersey asking her how they can start a similar project in their communities.
Donna extends her heart
Another long-range project, for which Donna has already set aside funds, is to customize a van (estimated at $60,000) that will enable homeless people on the street to take a shower and wash their clothes. “When they have clean clothes, they feel so much better about themselves,” she says.
Clearly, Donna’s heart for the homeless is contagious.
“Oh my goodness, they all have a story,” she says. “No one single homeless person ever woke up and said I want to be homeless.
“They tell me their story when I am out on the street with them” — they lost a job, their mental illness, divorce, running away from abuse, not making enough money working at fast food restaurants, she details.
“They are so grateful when I stop to talk and give them a Brian Bag,” she says. “They say, ‘Thank you’ and ‘God bless you.’”
One time, she gave a bottle of water to a man on a bench in New Haven, “and he says, ‘You were sent to me by God. I haven’t had any water or food for two days,’” she recalls.
Another homeless woman insisted on praying the rosary with her. “I couldn’t give her something without her giving me something,” Donna says. “She gave me a coin that was so dirty. I took it home and washed it; it had angels on both sides.
“It brings me joy when I see a homeless person and can help them,” she says. “I want other people to feel the joy I feel. They’re not going to hurt you.
“People want to help the homeless but they just don’t know how,” she concludes. So the Brian O’Connell Homeless Project is one way she has made it possible for people to help. Just as Mother Teresa said, “I like to say, ‘If you can’t feed 100 people, then just feed one.”