Mama Irene’s mission and outreach will continue, her son said Tuesday.
Known locally and affectionately as “Mama Irene,” Irene Myers left behind a legacy of giving and caring for others her son Marquise Morgan insisted will go on after her death on January 24.
Before her death, Myers was known for her clothes drives and Mama Irene’s Outreach, which she started 15 years ago to help those in need.
“I love my mom. I miss her very much every single day,” Morgan said. “The best thing I can do to honor her legacy is to keep the outreach going as long as we can. Her last wish in life is that we would continue it and we will continue her life’s work, because she instilled in us that is the right thing to do.”
A New York native, Myers founded Mama Irene’s Outreach. Among her efforts were collecting and distributing clothes and gifts at Christmas for boys and girls and also had a food pantry.
“She just had a big heart and always thought that helping people was the right thing to do,” Morgan said. “She was very guided by her Christian faith. She had a very rough childhood growing up and saw that even a person without a lot of resources or has received help before can pass that along to other people.”
Even with Mama Irene’s pleas for donations, there were times the family had to dig into its own resources for the pantry’s shelves.
“We were stocking our pantry and clothes drive with clothes and food we bought ourselves,” Morgan said. “What we were doing was as generous as we could make it.”
From clothes to gifts to food to even household appliances, Mama Irene and her “Disloyal Few” as she called her adopted family spread a message and more throughout the community.
“Going through town, doing our shopping, everywhere we go, someone would recognize her,” Morgan said, “and often it would be someone with a story to tell about how she helped someone in a rough spot. It wasn’t uncommon for her to have the same feeling I had — someone coming up and saying hello and saying thank you and keep up the good work. We were doing it out of the kindness of our heart. Someone would come to us in need and we would help them.”
Myers’ lasting impression on Morgan was one of giving as much as you can, and it’s a legacy he aspires to continue.
“The impact it had on me was realizing that there is the capacity for compassion, for charity, for giving as much as you can in all of us,” he said. “There is a common strand of humanity and our calling is to be cooperative, to help each other, to build great things together and to lift each other up if someone is down, no matter who that may be. No matter how hard you have it, no matter how difficult life may seem, you can still do right by others.”
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