Mary Teresa Funk served the City of Columbus from 2000 to 2010, after many years of being a neighborhood advocate and
President of the Harrison West Society. She moved to Pennsylvania Avenue
in 1969, where she and her
husband Roy raised their two sons Jason and Shawn. One of her earliest
victories was battling to
get the
Battelle Memorial Institute
located in the neighborhood to invest millions of dollars in new and repaired housing
throughout the area and the creation of
pocket parks along the Olentangy River.
“When I was an aide to then-Councilmember Ben
Espy, I got to know Mary’s voice long before I ever met her,” said former Mayor
Michael B. Coleman. “Mary Teresa would call me up every week and give me
hell as she worked to improve the conditions of her neighborhood and the lives
of the people who lived there.”
Mayor Coleman grew to respect Mary Funk’s
tenacious work for neighborhoods that he hired her during his first term in
office to serve as an internal liaison and advocate for neighborhoods and to
operate the Mayor’s Action Center, which
she then helped turn into Columbus’ 311 customer
service response system.
As a community liaison, Mary Teresa attended hundreds of neighborhood civic
and area commission meetings, and channeled her passion to the benefit of all the
people of Columbus. No residents' complaint was too trivial to merit her
attention. No resident's need was so great that she would not do all she could
to meet it. Nobody worked harder, and nobody impacted the lives of our
constituents more directly than she did.
Mary Teresa, as her name suggests, was a saint
without a trace of sanctimony. She served the public with joy in her heart, and
often sarcasm in her voice, keeping coworkers and friends laughing all the
while. Mary was still serving residents up to the day she passed away, in
November of 2010, returning phone calls from her hospital bed and meeting with
Police neighborhood liaison office while in the hospital.