Pauline Neri Shaver never imagined she’d one day oversee a multi-building campus for adults with disabilities. She just knew she had to help one child, and then another. This heartfelt memoir chronicles the unexpected path to becoming the founder of The Angelus, a long-term care home built not by investors but by neighbors, family, and love.
With storytelling as spirited as the woman herself, A Place to Live, to Love, to Learn: A Memoir of The Founding of The Angelus is both a tribute to caregiving and a roadmap for anyone who’s ever felt called to something bigger. Through memories both joyous and bittersweet, Pauline reveals how a life of service can grow out of small, steadfast steps, and how the most beautiful legacies are often born in response to great need. Told with honesty, humor, and a lifetime of hard-won wisdom, this memoir offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at what it means to serve—and to love—without limits.
Pauline Neri Shaver never imagined she’d one day oversee a multi-building campus for adults with disabilities. She just knew she had to help one child, and then another. This heartfelt memoir chronicles the unexpected path to becoming the founder of The Angelus, a long-term care home built not by investors but by neighbors, family, and love.
With storytelling as spirited as the woman herself, A Place to Live, to Love, to Learn: A Memoir of The Founding of The Angelus is both a tribute to caregiving and a roadmap for anyone who’s ever felt called to something bigger. Through memories both joyous and bittersweet, Pauline reveals how a life of service can grow out of small, steadfast steps, and how the most beautiful legacies are often born in response to great need. Told with honesty, humor, and a lifetime of hard-won wisdom, this memoir offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at what it means to serve—and to love—without limits.
Pauline Neri Shaver was born in 1937 in West Warwick, Rhode Island, the daughter of Florence and Horace Cadoret. Educated by nuns in a Catholic boarding school from age four to twelve, Pauline’s formative years instilled in her a deep faith, a strong will, and a capacity for compassion that would guide her entire life. By twenty-three, she was a devoted mother of three. Following a divorce less than a decade later, she worked as a physical education teacher and beloved coach at her parish school, creating championship-winning teams and an after-school program known throughout her community. To make ends meet, she also worked nights as a medical transcriptionist.
Without a college degree but with an extraordinary sense of purpose, Pauline went on to create the first group home of its kind for children with disabilities in Florida. That home would become The Angelus, a nonprofit organization providing lifetime care and dignity for individuals with cerebral palsy.
