Jane Alexander cofounded Women’s Lunch Place in 1982 with a vision to embrace the dignity of everyone who walked through the shelter’s door.
The women who gathered for meals “teach us how we need to be human with each other,” she told the Globe in 1991. “I feel like they’ve been sent to us, and we are absolutely called to be with them. But to be called, you have to hear.”
For 20 years as the executive director, Ms. Alexander did just that: listening to women who had been battered, who were sick and dying, who struggled with mental illness, or who simply had fallen on hard times and were trying to survive. Often she embraced women with a much-needed hug, a gesture absent from their difficult lives.
“She really ministered to people’s souls,” said Maren Stever, who had worked for and volunteered at the daytime shelter in its early years, “and she made sure everyone else there was doing the same.”
Ms. Alexander, whose legacy of serving dignified meals to poor and homeless women continues to this day in the Back Bay shelter, died in Lowell General Hospital July 26 of heart valve disease and an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. She was 66 and had lived in Dracut with her sister, Sarah, since 2016.
“She was so devoted to the needs of homeless women — I would say fiercely devoted,” said Dr. Eileen Reilly, the shelter’s other cofounder, who now works for the state Department of Mental Health as a psychiatrist for the homeless in Boston.
Ms. Alexander “had this phrase we would use, ‘We’re going to love each woman as a sister,’ and she really believed that,” Reilly said. “I think that’s what motivated her, that love. It didn’t matter that the work was so hard. She could see what she was doing for the women.”
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she was a history major, Ms. Alexander composed newsletters to share stories about the women of Women’s Lunch Place.
In doing so, she wrote an ongoing, informal history of women who lived on Boston’s streets:
“As friends of the women, we are constantly in awe of their bravery. Michelle told me last week with great happiness that it had been over four months since she had used crack. It was a tremendous victory for her. I shared my exuberance at her strength and was about to leave when she said in a whisper, leaning against me, ‘But a week after I got out of detox I found out I was HIV-positive.’ I sat down heavily next to her and touched her arm. All I could think to say was her name. But she would not be sad. Without flinching, she said, ‘I feel good. I know I can’t use, not anymore, even though I feel hopeless. I’m just going to keep trying to do good.’ "
Then there was Greta, who tucked herself in a corner behind the shelter’s bathroom door, wrapping “herself in layers of toilet paper and plastic, which she hopes will protect her from assault. She cries out against the voices from her past and the fears from her nights outside,” Ms. Alexander wrote.
“She asks me to help put on her socks. I kneel in front of her and take her small swollen feet in my hands as I ease on her white ankle socks. I feel tremendous gratitude that she allows me to give her this attention.”
Jane Alexander was born May 18, 1956, in Brookings, S.D., and grew up there, the oldest child of William Alexander and Ruth Musselman Alexander.
Her mother was an English professor at South Dakota State University in Brookings. Her father, who died of cancer when Jane was 22, ran a hotel that went out of business around the time she left for college.
When she was young, Ms. Alexander worked for her father, an experience that left an impression because his employees “were from limited backgrounds,” Sarah said. “She definitely heard their stories and was moved by their stories.”
After college, Ms. Alexander worked in Boston at Parker Street Shelter and the Pine Street Inn, where Reilly was among her colleagues.
They noticed that women, including “some of the most severely mentally ill,” spent their days standing across the street from Pine Street Inn waiting for it to reopen, Reilly recalled. “We were talking about how unfair it was. And then we thought, maybe we could open up a place.”
They envisioned a place where women could take shelter from the heat or cold, share a meal, and have access to women’s health items. They found space in the basement of Church of the Covenant in the Back Bay.
Ms. Alexander “was very talented,” Reilly said. “She didn’t have any business experience, yet she was able to develop Women’s Lunch Place as a nonprofit. She gathered together a board of directors. She knew how to fund-raise and write grants. She just figured it out. I would think, ‘How does she know how to write grants?’ "
On their first day they set the tone, serving food on china plates with silverware, set out on tables decorated with fresh flowers. Rather than stand in line, women simply went in and sat at tables. If they wished, they could join workers and volunteers in the kitchen, preparing meals.
“What we have to give is humanity,” Ms. Alexander told the Globe in 2002.
Not long after that interview, she parted ways with Women’s Lunch Place and worked at Renewal House in Boston and for East Boston Ecumenical Community Council.
Ms. Alexander volunteered for the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina, did medical work in Haiti, and graduated from the Tulane University School of Social Work in New Orleans with a master’s in social work.
She married Mark Johnson and they lived in Moorhead, Minn., where she was executive director for Churches United, a safe shelter nonprofit. The couple remained friends after separating, and he died in 2018.
After moving to Dracut, Ms. Alexander provided care for older people in Cambridge, Acton, and Bedford.
“The other thing about Jane is that she had a great sense of humor, which was really important for the work she did,” Reilly said. “She liked to laugh. And she just had such empathy for the women.”
At Women’s Lunch Place, Ms. Alexander “was just completely, 100 percent focused on the person she was listening to,” said Stever, who now lives in Menlo Park, Calif.
“I think there’s empathy that we’re all striving to have,” she said of Ms. Alexander, “and then there are people who are just extraordinary at that level.”
In addition to her sister, Sarah, Ms. Alexander leaves a brother, Andrew of Basehor, Kansas.
Programs that included many of Ms. Alexander’s writings were printed for a memorial gathering that was scheduled for this past Saturday in Cambridge.
The first entry was about Trudy, to whom Ms. Alexander handed a birthday gift one day.
“She stands there, and I realize that she is waiting for her birthday hug. She nestles her head on my shoulder and I rest my head on hers. She pats my back, and I hers. We stand like this for many minutes, swaying back and forth. I wonder with an ache deep down how long she has needed this. I try to remember if I have ever hugged her before. I think about how long I have known her, and how little. I think this must be love and trust, stretching across the not-knowing.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.