Walls of windows in Susan Kiely’s home in the Four Seasons hotel offer sweeping views of downtown Denver, and the light-filled home is decorated with lots of art.
On a recent afternoon, after finishing a day packed with meetings, Kiely prepared for a trip to New York to see some new plays — a passion she shares with husband, Leo Kiely, the former CEO of MillerCoors.
But she took time to sit in her living room and talk about her life’s journey — the hard times, the spirituality, and the philanthropy — that led to her being honored with the 2015 Service with Style award from Volunteers of America. She will receive the award at a luncheon on Nov. 6.
She doesn’t mince words.
“To encourage another woman, it’s important to use the pain of your past experiences to let that person know it’s only for a season,” she said. “There’s so much out there that is so good.”
She’s an ordained minister with a master’s degree in youth and family ministry, and friends like Jim White say that faith is her driving force.
“As a corporate wife of (someone) who’s probably one of the top people in the industry in this town, she could have very easily gone the route of just giving money,” said White, who was public relations director of VOA before retiring earlier this year. “But because of her faith, she really rolled up her sleeves and walked the walk, getting involved with people.”
She’s worked with mothers recovering from domestic abuse and drug addiction, and with women suffering from poverty in places like India and Ghana. The urgency of her desire to help — especially struggling mothers — is rooted in her childhood.
“I was born out of wedlock, in 1947, and I never met my biological father,” she said. “I don’t even know his name. He was married.”
Her mother, who’d grown up in New York City, still lived there.
“She could have gotten an (illegal) abortion, but she chose not to. So she had a big A on her chest. My mom was quite a hell-raiser.”
She took her baby, Susan, to live with her father and stepmother in Chicago for a few years, then moved to Philadelphia to live with another relative.
Eventually, seeking companionship, “she married a man who I was told was my father, but he wasn’t,” said Kiely. “He was very abusive to my mother as well as me, and he’d be in and out our lives.”
Work and reinvention
She now believes her mother struggled with bipolar disorder, riding a rollercoaster of highs and lows. They moved frequently.
Her mother worked a patchwork of jobs up and down the East Coast — she managed a restaurant in a bowling alley, the credit department of a retail store .
“One job, for a two-year period, she and I were cleaning motel rooms,” said Kiely, who credits her mother with tenacity and the fierce desire to develop her daughter’s character.
“She always had a job, and she cleaned a church on weekends to put me in a Catholic school. She taught me to balance a checkbook in fourth grade, and she expected me to prepare meals.”
Kiely attended four different schools when she was in fourth grade.
“No one was aware of bullying then, what it was like when you’re always the new kid at school,” she said. “I was tall and skinny with glasses and buck teeth, coming in as the ugly duckling, and when you’ve been abused, you almost take on that persona.”
By high school, she’d attended 13 different schools.
A good student, she won a scholarship to college in Illinois with the goal of becoming a teacher.
“I completely reinvented myself,” she said. “I worked two jobs so I could have the kind of clothes I wanted, and I lied when people asked about my family. I said everything was wonderful.”
After graduation, in 1965, she moved to Philadelphia to teach in a Head Start program.
Eventually, she met Leo, who was getting his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. They fell in love and married three months later.
After he graduated, they moved to Cincinnati for his new job, and she gave birth to their first child, a son.
“We knew no one,” she said. “I had a new baby, and was totally unprepared for motherhood.”
She started to see a counselor, seeking help with learning to become a good mother and wife, because she’d had such an unstable childhood.
Spiritual guidance
And then, a few years later, she was invited to a Bible study and learned from scripture that “you don’t have to be perfect for God to love you,” she said.
The discovery was important. As a child, she’d always thought if she was “good enough,” her mother wouldn’t yell at her and life would be easier.
She kept studying the Bible.
“I didn’t accept any interpretation but my own,” she said. “As I read it for myself, I saw nuggets of truth and grains of wisdom that I really wanted to implement.”
As her husband climbed the corporate ladder, they moved their family — a son and daughter — to different cities around the country.
In Dallas, she found a spiritual director at the Dallas Theological Seminary, and made some “great girlfriends” through the
Because Leo traveled a lot for his job, “the kids needed a mom to be at home,” she said, “so I was president of every PTA, and dug my heels in and did the auctions, the charity work, the Junior League work.”
She loved life in Dallas, so when her husband asked what she thought about moving to Colorado, where he’d been offered a job at CEO of Coors, she paused.
“I loved my friends, and I was a bit reticent about him being in the beer industry,” she said.
But she changed her mind after meeting Pete Coors, who said he wanted Leo to transform the company.
“I think it was my love for my husband,” she said, “and trust that no matter where I went, God would provide what I needed.”
Single mothers a focus
They moved in 1993 and, with the kids off to college, she wanted to become a counselor or social worker. But she didn’t want a caseload, so she enrolled at the Denver Seminary.
Her goal was to work with “people who really needed some help,” she said. “I really do believe we’re made up of the spiritual, the physical, and the psychological, so if anything is out of alignment, you’re at a loss.”
Her internship at the Denver Rescue Mission’s Champa House — which helps single women with dependent children become self-sufficient — was pivotal in terms of deciding to work with single mothers.
“They’d come out of domestic violence or drug and alcohol abuse in the past,” she said. “It was a real opportunity for me to get in the trenches with them, really get to know them, and offer unconditional love.”
After graduating, she contacted Robert Woolfolk, the pastor of Agape Christian Church in Five Points, whom she’d met through seminary, and offered her help, then began teaching parenting classes at the church.
She also reached out to , where she became the volunteer chaplain for 185 senior citizens who met daily at Sunset Park at 18th and Larimer streets.
“She would do Bible study there,” said White, “and even if people didn’t have a lot of faith through most of life, in the final years it can be comforting, and she was great over there.”
She also brought lots of bingo prizes, and shirts and hats from Coors.
“The elderly people loved her,” said White, who worked at VOA. “They’d wait for her to come every day.”
But that job ended when the senior center was closed for renovation.
Uncertain about what to do next, Kiely booked a trip to New York, and during that visit, she attended a World Vision AIDS Day breakfast and learned that India had one of the highest numbers of AIDS victims in the world.
Soon, she joined a trip to India.
“I kept thinking how I could make a difference in these women’s lives by giving them a career,” she said.
Self-sufficiency
Back home, in 2006, she started , a nonprofit that creates economic development programs that focus on education and skill training to help women escape poverty through self-sufficiency.
Working with Operation Mercy Charitable Company, she opened two sewing centers in India to help untouchable and other lower-caste women earn income, and also helped fund a primary school.
Through Women With a Cause, she started similar economic development programs in Ghana, Thailand, and Ethiopia.
And then, when her first grandchild was born, Kiely decided to spend more time in Denver, so she started the WE Initiative at Women With a Cause to help homeless mothers and female veterans to become self-sufficient through developing careers in nursing and health care.
She worked with Jesuit Father Michael Sheeran, the former president of Regis University, to starting the partnership.
“What struck me was that the deeper Susan got into it, the more obstacles she realized were there,” he said. “It wasn’t just giving a chance to these women. It also meant providing daycare to the kids, who came from such awful situations, and then getting them counseling, and then figuring out how to help the mothers keep pace with the Regis education, which tends to be pretty competitive.”
With each new hurdle that appeared, he said, “her sense of what she had to commit to kept growing. If she had to (use) every dime in the accounts of herself and Leo in order to take care of these poor people, it wouldn’t bother her at all to do it.”
That passion also manifested whenever she spearheaded charity auctions around town.
“You should have seen her run auctions when all the Coors people were in the audience,” said White, with a laugh. “It wasn’t pretty.”
And even though White no longer works for VOA, she hasn’t let him off the hook.
“She’s a force to be dealt with,” he said. “She called recently and said she needed help for a particular woman who needed furniture, and she also needed me to figure out how to get the furniture into the apartment.”
He reminded her that he’d retired.
“She said, ‘I don’t care if you’re retired or not. You still have contacts, so get out there and do it.’ That’s how she rolls.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or @coconnordp
Service with style
Volunteers of America fashion luncheon honoring Susan Kiely, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 6, Pinnacle Room, Grand Hyatt Hotel Denver, 1750 Welton St. Tickets are $75 each, table sponsorships start at $750. Tickets online at voacoloarado.com or call 720-264-3333.
