On the wall of Sandra Brawders’ tiny office at the University of Maine, where she runs the Center for Adult Learning and Literacy, hangs a framed illustration from the pages of the Alice in Wonderland story.

Addressing the Cheshire cat draped lazily across a tree branch, Alice asks for advice about which path she should take through the woods. She doesn’t much care where she goes, she informs the grinning cat, as long as she gets somewhere in the end.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” says the cat, “if only you walk long enough.”

Brawders smiles serenely as she contemplates the poster, gazing at it the way a person might gaze at a photo of a wise and beloved mentor from the past.

“Oh, yes, that means a lot to me,” she says, her large, expressive eyes scanning the room for words. “That cat is really smart, you know. I guess I’ve always felt like a person in a strange land. As a child and as an adult, I’ve always tried to figure out the next step, how to keep walking and take with me what I’ve learned along the way. It’s like what Annie Dillard wrote in an essay, that you should hold to your passion like a weasel and follow it wherever it takes you.”

After just an hour or so in Brawders’ cheery company, you sense that the passion she follows so tenaciously may be a bit too expansive and amorphous to absorb all at once. It spreads in every direction, blanketing the world’s down-and-outs — people and animals alike — in a vast crazy quilt of concern.

Job descriptions alone don’t quite get to the heart of her life’s mission, and Brawders has had many titles in a social-service career that started in New Jersey in the 1960s. She’s been a high school teacher, a preacher, a counselor to prisoners and prostitutes, and the director of a large women’s homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., that she turned into a national model of clear-headed innovation in the care of the homeless.

Her work captured the attention of the national media, was emulated by shelter operators in other large cities, and attracted politicians and show biz celebrities like a magnet.

Yet when Brawders moved three years ago to a farm in Exeter, where she lives with four dogs and 48 abandoned cats, she instantly felt that she had found her real home. Maine was a beautiful state whose small population made even the most overwhelming problems of society appear manageable.

“Maine is the kind of place that makes you feel it’s actually possible to wipe out poverty,” Brawders says, her eyes blazing with enthusiasm. “After working in places like Washington, D.C., the problems in Maine seem doable. It feels like coming home to me.”

As director of the adult learning center in Orono, Brawders oversees the training and technical assistance for teachers of 130 adult education programs in more than 200 communities from Kittery to Fort Kent. Friendly and easygoing in her tie-dyed office attire, she serves as the agency’s spiritual leader as well as a pragmatic, no-nonsense administrator with a flair for ferreting out the government money needed to make things run.

“It’s the above-and-beyond people who get the most done in this world, and Sandy personifies that,” says Richard Fernald, who teaches inmates at the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor as part of the Esteem Machine program that Brawders helped to start three years ago. “She has the ability to get a roomful of 300 people fired up to take on Herculean tasks. She really inspires people.”

Ask Brawders where all that energy and compassion comes from, the source of the spark, and she warms to the subject right before your eyes. Her cheeks flush brightly, giving her round, ruddy face a cherubic look framed by her long, thick hair.

“I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, in a close-knit neighborhood of people of Irish descent,” she says. “It was a house where everyone was welcome, where people gathered whenever someone died or someone was born. My family took care of everyone. My grandparents lived with us until they died. In fact, I never knew what a nursing home was until I worked in one.”

Many of the young mothers were taking jobs outside the home in the early 1950s, and Brawders’ grandmother served as the kindly nanny for a houseful of neighborhood children.

“She was a round, jolly Irish woman with red hair,” Brawders recalls, giving a fair description of herself in the process. “She always wore a housedress and an apron with pockets that were filled with treats for the kids. She was soft-spoken and dutiful, and she taught me how to cook and take care of the younger children. I was kind of an old kid, I guess, with a sense of responsibility. I liked to do quiet things. I was always fascinated with science, and wanted to be a great scientist like Marie Curie.”

Brawders went to the University of Delaware to study chemistry, in fact, but later became an English and drama major with a vague notion of becoming a playwright. In 1969, she married her high school boyfriend just two weeks before he was sent to Vietnam.

“I was a pacifist and begged him to go to Canada, but he wouldn’t,” says Brawders, who was teaching English at the time in a New Jersey junior high school. “When he returned a year later, he was very disturbed, screwed up on drugs. In Vietnam he had been allowed to be as violent as he had to be to survive, and he couldn’t control his anger anymore. I couldn’t understand it. He was physically abusive and we went through five years of hell.”

To escape the frequent beatings, Brawders slept in her car or took rooms at the YWCA. She felt terrified and trapped, unable to even pick up the phone and find a way out. By the time they divorced in 1976, Brawders had grown a lot.

“It was a turning point in my life,” she says. “I realized I was able to help everyone else but myself. I needed a dramatic change.”

She found it while immersed in the study of ethics at the Princeton Theological Seminary. If helping others was her true calling, she knew she would have to go where the worst problems existed. She started by applying for a position as pastoral counselor to the criminally insane at the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey. Although some of the men simply wanted to talk or learn to read, others made much bigger demands of Brawders.

“One man in his 50s, who was serving three consecutive life sentences, asked me how far down in the mud Jesus reached his hands,” Brawders recalls. “And I wasn’t supposed to come back until I knew. I didn’t miss too many beats, and I said `All the way.’ I saw the face of God in that man.”

Her reply, she knew, was more than just a comforting thought for a despairing murderer; it was a bold statement of Brawders’ own principles, a work plan for her own life.

While working as a cook at a small restaurant, she was approached by a few local church people who asked if she would be interested in starting a lunch program for Trenton’s elderly poor. It was the grass-roots kind of ministry she’d been looking for, and she jumped at the chance. Later, as executive director of the program, she rustled up donations from the community, bought a van, and began taking food to the people on the streets. In all, the program fed as many as 1,400 people a day.

Brawders started a program for old women with health problems, and then one to help relieve the daily burdens on spouses of Alzheimer victims.

“I realized that you couldn’t get far from the problems of the individuals themselves, or you’d wind up with programs you didn’t need,” she says.

Soon, the word spread far about this big-hearted dynamo living among Trenton’s poor. In 1981, board members of a women’s homeless shelter named House of Ruth in Washington, D.C., asked her to interview for the director’s job.

“The first thing they told me was that it was a shame I wasn’t black,” Brawders says with a smile. “Marion Barry was the mayor then, and was making an all-out effort to get more blacks into city-funded jobs. But I guess they liked me because they hired me anyway.”

When she arrived, the homeless were still being thought of as a mass of faceless, ragged souls, most of them alcoholic men, who needed to be fed and prayed over and sent on their way. The closer Brawders looked at the problem, however, the more she saw critical differences among the homeless. There were pregnant teens, sick old women, crackhead mothers and their addicted babies, abused prostitutes with AIDS, and enough forms of severe mental illness to defy easy categorization.

Brawders opened the shelter 24 hours a day and staffed it in shifts that worked around the clock. She got a grant to fund an on-site medical clinic, the first of its kind in the country.

“My rationale was that if the SPCA could take care of cats and dogs 24 hours a day, then we could take care of women and children,” she says.

With the help of the mayor, who gave the shelter abandoned houses in the city, House of Ruth divided the homeless population into five groups in separate locations. Each catered to the specific needs of the individuals they housed. One of them was a transitional shelter, where women could learn to share living quarters and household duties to prepare for a productive life outside. Women could stay for 10 months, and counseling and class studies went on throughout the day and night.

Through the work adjustment program, residents were paid to help out at the shelter as training for future employment. If they started calling in sick, Brawders dragged them out of bed. If they did drugs, they were suspended for a week and then made to return.

In a program called “All Us Smart Women,” volunteers roamed the streets of Washington in a bus to educate prostitutes about the basics of independent living. Classes were held during the 10 or 15 minutes that the hookers could spare between tricks.

House of Ruth eventually became the largest women’s shelter in Washington, D.C. Tipper Gore, the vice president’s wife, volunteered there. Other congressional wives showed up in their full-length minks, eager to cuddle babies or work in the kitchen.

“Sandy was much more responsive to the real needs of people, and that allowed them to move out of homelessness,” says Diane Kenty, a Boston attorney who volunteered at House of Ruth when Brawders was there. “It wasn’t just warehousing. Sandy was a very hard worker who was not afraid of hard work and messy things. Even as director, she’d work in the kitchen or get into the shower with an elderly woman and de-lice her. She was also excellent at testifying on Capitol Hill, and was very astute at educating politicians on homelessness and getting them to help out. These were the Reagan years, too, and she managed to generate a lot of interest among Republicans.”

When the Comic Relief organization was looking for a shelter to publicize, it chose House of Ruth over all others in the country. Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal showed up to hold babies and raise social consciousness and money. Later, the high-profile comedians sent a new van to House of Ruth.

Mitch Snyder, considered the country’s most strident homeless advocate until his suicide a few years ago, was furious at all the attention House of Ruth was getting.

“Mitch wanted Comic Relief at his own shelter,” Brawders remembers. “He knew that celebrities raised big money, and he figured we wouldn’t make the event into enough of a political statement. Mitch and I disagreed a lot in our approaches to the problem of homelessness. He believed housing was the only answer, and I could understand why he was so political about it. He knew how to play the game to raise public awareness. But he thought I was crazy, and said no one should be able to control homeless people through programs like ours. To me, that was a cop-out. My idea was that nothing good could happen for these women without an education.”

Despite the highly charged politics that tended to whirl around the issue of homelessness, House of Ruth proved itself to be one of the most successful programs of its kind in the country. When Brawders started there, it served about 40 women a night. When she left, in 1987, it was serving 7,000 a year — not only with food and a bed, but with education and life skills that people could use to stay off the streets.

Sherri Cutrie, a Philadelphia businesswoman who was the shelter’s assistant director in those days, credits Brawder for turning House of Ruth into the model for a nation.

“She took a band-aid program and developed it into a fantastic success that basically redefined care of the homeless,” Cutrie says. “Sandy is a very special person, a truly gifted lady. When you hear her speak, you’re just inspired to go out and give of yourself. When she gets a team together and sets her sights, there’s no end to what she can do.”

Brawders, whose goal has always been to work herself out of one job and move to the next, left House of Ruth at its heyday. After six years, her name was nearly synonymous with the shelter and its mission. It was time to give someone else a chance.

“I didn’t want to be known as the Grandmother of the Homeless,” she says. “People began saying, `Oh, Sandy, I could never do what you do.’ I wanted to be a catalyst for change, not a martyr for the cause.”

After working in the homeless project in Quincy, Mass., Brawders moved even farther north to take the adult education job in Maine. She immediately set to work finding money for existing programs and creating new ones. She wrote a grant proposal to start the inmate education project, which now operates in seven selected county jails around the state. Her proposal for The Esteem Machine was so persuasive and promising, in fact, that Maine got more federal money for its jail program than even the crowded Florida corrections system.

With her small staff, she helped devise education standards to make classes consistent for the estimated 100,000 Maine adults under 65 years of age who don’t have high school diplomas.

Yet the greatest test of her creative fund-raising abilities may still await her, as public money for adult education grows slimmer. Funds for the homeless-shelter education program have already dried up, the grant for the jail program is slated to end next year, and federal subsidies for the entire adult education in Maine recently were cut by almost 10 percent.

Brawders, who has always earned her living on temporary grant money, says her own job may be threatened next summer by a lack of funding. If it happens, though, she has no intention of looking outside Maine for her next challenge.

“My parents told me once that when I was a small child I saw a picture of woods and a moose and said I wanted to live in Maine some day,” Brawders recalls. “I never visited Maine before I came here three years ago, but it really felt magical to me. I guess after walking long enough I’ve finally gotten somewhere after all, like the cat in Alice in Wonderland promised. This feels like home.”