Her first storefront shelter was displaced by the Target Center arena. So she remodeled a vacant insurance building at 525 N. 7th St., offering meals, medical and dental help, eyeglasses, showers, shoes, clothing and space for social workers. Then she built Mary's Place, a 240-bed temporary housing center named for the Virgin Mary. A new addition will double its capacity. The old insurance building became a teen and children's center when she opened the new 27,000-square-foot Sharing and Caring Hands center two years ago.

She built it all -- and runs a $3 million-a-year operation -- with no government money. Only a few workers are paid; she is not.

Each day, Copeland sees a rising tide of homelessness among the poor and working poor, of domestic abuse and child neglect.

Mary's Place is almost always full, but on one recent day she finds room for a woman and her seven children, all under 13, who say they fled overnight from an abusive father, carrying little more than their clothing. Copeland kneels with the children, explains the housekeeping rules ("you've got to help your mom"), then leads them in saying the Lord's Prayer.

She comforts a woman who is celebrating her birthday alone. She tells volunteer staff members to check out some landlord problems. She helps a young working man get bus transportation and glasses. "That lady's going to heaven," the man says.

To a phone caller, she says, "I'm very proud of the way you've taken all that pain and given it to God." Often, she'll offer rosaries to guests, and it doesn't matter if they're Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.

Ever since the early years of her work, Copeland has taken time each day to kneel on the floor and wash the street-worn feet of her guests. "It's the closest . . . I come to touching Jesus. I think of how our Lord served the world," she said. "It's the favorite thing I do."

She is acutely aware of children, of cycles of family breakdown, and her latest vision is to open a Minneapolis-area orphanage where Mother Teresa's nuns could nurture kids whose parents are unable to take care of them.

"My dream would be to give these kids a good, safe place," she said, a home where they could study, grow spiritually, sleep undisturbed -- "where they can skip home from school and not be afraid."

She is 57 and, she said, she doesn't worry about the long-term future of her organization, where three of her 12 children also are involved. She has a strong board, she said, and "God'll let his work go on, 'cause it doesn't depend on me."

She rises at 3:45 a.m. each day and an hour later she is speed-walking while praying in her local Catholic Church. At the center, she prays not just with her guests, but with volunteers, staff members, visiting grantmakers and journalists.

Sharing and Caring Hands counts about 1,200 visits a day, Saturday through Thursday. Copeland spends most of her time leaping from crisis to crisis, need to need. At day's end, she often is drained and pained and, she confessed, "I have a lot inside."

Then she turns to her husband, Dick Copeland, who she says brought her out of her own dysfunctional childhood, who prays with her and who keeps her going with his constant kidding.

"You're just a little kid. You've never grown up," she quotes him as telling her. And, in the next breath, she adds her own child-like credo: "I can change the world. I really believe I can."