Pamela Atkinson, Utah’s champion for the homeless, remembered as ‘larger than life’

In a church full of people who came to honor Pamela Atkinson’s memory at her funeral Friday — a crowd that included Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and other prominent dignitaries — Ed Snoddy said he had “many stories” from the more than 30 years he spent alongside her helping Utah’s most vulnerable. 

“But this one has stayed with me a long, long time,” he said. 

Atkinson, he said, invited then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to come with the Volunteers of America’s outreach team to check in on people experiencing homelessness. That day, “we went to see our homeless friend, Chuck,” Snoddy said. Chuck and Leavitt chatted for about 20 minutes before parting ways. 

But the next day, Snoddy said, when he and Atkinson went to check on Chuck again, “he said he was in a lot of pain.” They took him to the hospital, where he was admitted for liver cancer and diagnosed as terminally ill.

“Pamela called the governor and told him … how much Chuck enjoyed meeting him,” Snoddy said. 

Leavitt then went to the hospital to spend more time with him. 

“This whole time, the doctors, the nurses were going, ‘Who is this homeless person and why is the governor in here?’” he said.

Atkinson died Oct. 10 at the age of 93. 

“Her body finally wore out from her continual love and service to so many, particularly the vulnerable in society, but her lasting impact will live on through the footprints of all she has left behind,” her obituary says. 

During her funeral service at the First Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City on Friday, Atkinson was remembered as a pillar in Utah’s homeless and humanitarian community who was as politically savvy and influential as she was selfless. 

Atkinson advised four Utah governors, including Cox, on homeless services and policies. Several facilities and programs have been named after her, including the Pamela Atkinson Resource Center, a 300-bed emergency shelter in South Salt Lake, and the Pamela Atkinson Homeless Trust Fund, a state account that supports homeless services across Utah.  

Snoddy recalled that while Chuck was hospitalized, Atkinson — “being a wee bit cheeky at times” — hid his dog, Lucy, in her jacket to sneak her in to see him, Snoddy said. 

“I said, ‘Are you sure?’ She said: ‘Yes. Just follow me and don’t tell anyone,’” he recalled, to laughs from the crowd. “So we went into his room, and Chuck’s reaction was, ‘First, the governor and now my dog Lucy? That’s the best medicine ever.’ I can see his face right now.” 

When Chuck later died while on hospice at a friend’s house, Atkinson held his hand. 

She was there for countless others, Snoddy recalled, and also spent Thanksgiving and Christmas trudging through snow handing out presents and warm turkey or roast beef dinners to people sleeping in tents or nothing but a sleeping bag. 

“Often you’d see a little tear come out of their eyes, and it was common to hear, ‘Thank you for not forgetting about me,’” he said. “And that was Pamela. She did not forget.” 

Utah’s current governor, Cox, spoke at Atkinson’s funeral. At times his voice shook with emotion as some wiped tears from their cheeks. 

Cox said when he first learned of her death, he looked through photos to reminisce. He had pictures of her during vigils honoring people who had died homeless, others that showed her introducing him to Utah’s former Sen. “Mitt Romney, the Dalai Lama, and apostles of my own faith.” 

“Such was the life of Pamela Atkinson,” he said. “For more than 20 years, she served as an adviser and confidant to Utah’s most powerful politicians. And for longer than that she served as an angel to thousands of Utah’s most vulnerable.” 

He and other speakers acknowledged that she was often called the “Mother Teresa” of Utah, but she “hated that comparison” because it painted her as someone rare and remarkable when she continually urged that anyone — through small acts of kindness alone — could do what she did. 

“Pamela was constantly asking us to ask ourselves, ‘What would Jesus do?’ … However, I never had to ask what would Jesus do. I would only have to look at what Pamela was actually doing,” Cox said. “For years she taught me and all of us how to live and how to serve and how to love.” 

Born in Bromley, Kent, England in 1933, Atkinson herself experienced a childhood “marked by poverty and hardship,” her obituary says. 

“She lived through the air raids of World War II, watched her father gamble away the family’s income, and experienced his eventual abandonment,” according to her obituary. “She knew firsthand what it meant to go without food, stable housing, or even the clothing needed to fit in at school.” 

Atkinson poured herself into her education, which her obituary says “was the key to breaking the poverty cycle.” She later traveled the world and earned multiple academic degrees before she became a nurse, worked in hospital administration, and eventually came to Salt Lake City, where she stayed. 

Rev. Jamie White, the senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City, said Atkinson was an “incredible, larger-than-life force” that she compared to Hyperion, the world’s tallest living tree that towers 380 feet tall in California’s Redwood National Park. 

White said it’s easy to “stare up at her, her stature, and feel insecure about our inadequate, maybe meager efforts to answer life’s big question for ourselves. We might think to ourselves, we could never do what she did.” 

But White noted that Hyperion’s pinecones, its seeds, are as small as a thumbnail. 

“Do you think that Pamela, sleeping in the cold as a teenager in the U.K., often hungry at night and unsure if she’d ever make it out of poverty, much less become a nurse and do all she was able to accomplish — do you think she could possibly imagine the influence she would have?” White said. “No. Absolutely not. She started as a tiny pinecone, like we all do. She simply gave her tiny self over to Jesus and made a conscious decision to listen to what she called God’s ‘holy nudges’ in her life.” 

The governor said when he asked Atkinson before she died what her final message was to Utahns, she said: “Just follow Jesus. It’s so easy to do.’”