Brenda Lovelady Spahn, the founder of The Lovelady Center in Birmingham that has helped nearly 20,000 women get back on their feet after hard times, has died.

Spahn died Dec. 18. She was 75.

She founded a ministry to women in 2004 by inviting seven former inmates of the Tutwiler Prison for Women to live in her home.

She later converted the former East End Hospital in East Lake into a residential center to help women rehabilitate and recover, while also housing their children.

“It’s almost impossible to express the magnitude of her commitment to the call once it was there,” said John McNeil, chairman and chief operating officer for The Lovelady Center. “Many of these women, because of their circumstances, had been separated from their families, separated from their children.”

The Lovelady Center currently houses 510 women and 100 children, and has an aftercare program that brings the total number to about 750 women it is working with daily, McNeil said.

“It was her consistent message to them that they were important, that they were loved, that what people said about them did not define them, that their past actions did not define them, that they were defined by their creator, who not only loved them, but had a purpose for their life,” McNeil said.

Before launching her ministry, she ran a chain of tax preparation services and a mortgage company and also did debt counseling, McNeil said.

“She was a very successful businesswoman,” he said. “She felt the call to go to these women in prison.”

An IRS raid on her tax service offices made her face the possibility of a potential prison sentence, and turned into a new phase in her life, McNeil said. Spahn pleaded guilty in 2004 to aiding to file a false tax return. Prosecutors said she entered erroneous information to create inflated refunds for four clients. She faced 12 years in prison. She took a plea deal and sold the tax practice.

‘’I realized only by the grace of God I was not one of them,” she said in an interview about her legal trouble that almost made her a prison inmate.

Growing up in Birmingham, Spahn had lived in a trailer as a child and experienced poverty, McNeil said. She was determined to become wealthy, and succeeded. She owned property in Gulf Shores and businesses including Excell Mortgage in Birmingham.

She turned one of her houses into the first Lovelady House, after Spahn’s maiden name. People called it a halfway house. Spahn corrected them, saying it was a ‘’whole-way’’ house.

‘’Nothing we do is halfway,’’ she said.

Spahn turned aside her previous business aspirations and dedicated her life to restoring hope for women in trouble, McNeil said.

“At the point of entering the doors of this place, they had pretty much lost hope,” McNeil said. “For them to be able to receive that message of love and be surrounded by people who support them, but more than that, give the ability, the life skills, job training, that made it possible for them to be a contributing member of society once they left the program.”

In 2010, some donors purchased the former Carraway Methodist Medical Center property in Birmingham and offered it to Spahn for a possible expansion of the Lovelady Center.

“When she had a goal or a vision where she thought things were going, there was little if anything that could stop her,” McNeil said.

Converting the 54-acre site into a rehabilitation center ran into plenty of obstacles and the city never re-zoned the property for that use.

“That was probably too much of a leap,” McNeil said.

Spahn instead turned her energy into renovating the Lovelady Center in its East Lake location.

Eventually the Carraway property was sold to developers who are now turning it into housing and the new Coca-Cola Amphitheater at Uptown, which is expected to open in 2025.

Three years ago, Spahn turned day-to-day leadership of the Lovelady Center over to her daughter, who had been helping her since the beginning of the ministry. Melinda MeGahee now serves as executive director.

“Never in my life did we not have other people living with us that she was trying to help,” MeGahee said. “She was called to do what she did, and she did it well.”

MeGahee has continued her mother’s passion for helping women rebound from tough circumstances. “She was amazing, fierce, just a force to be reckoned with,” MeGahee said. “She loved hard, loved well, and she loved with everything she had.”

A memorial service will be held Dec. 27, but MeGahee said she’s looking for an appropriate venue large enough to welcome all the people affected by the ministry. That will be announced later, she said.

“It was a holistic approach to healing of these women that came here for help,” McNeil said. “That’s her legacy. That legacy will be tens of thousands of people.”