At the roast of Providence Mayor David Cicilline on Thursday night, Nondas Voll quoted Sen. Edward Kennedy:

“The works goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

The roast was the last event in the more than 13 years that Voll has served as executive director of the Fund for Community Progress. And the quote seemed a fitting closing line.

In the years she has been in charge of the fund, which is really 26 grass-roots agencies that work for long-term change, she has seen it become more businesslike and professional. Voll has gained access to businesses that might not have welcomed the idea of workplace giving in the past. She has pushed and prodded in the most thoughtful ways. And she has seen a fascinating change in the increasing public acceptance of ideas that once seemed firmly enclosed in the liberal corner. Things like “advocacy” and “social change” have claimed more and more currency in some very mainstream places.

“To change public opinion takes decades,” said Voll, as she talked in the fund offices on Broad Street in Cranston Friday morning. “We never said we could solve all the problems, but we can bring the community’s attention to them.”

Even the annual roast, a zany comic mugging of high-profile Rhode Islanders, has been a way to make people more aware of the fund.

Voll was very young when she looked at a newspaper and learned a hard lesson. She was living in Forest Hills, N.Y., at a time of blackouts and duck-and-cover drills in the closing days of World War II. And she saw that picture in the paper of the mushroom cloud over Japan. She got sick.

“Our government did that. From that day on I was aware of the insanity of violence.”

She was head of the Mission Society at the Catholic school she attended when her family moved to Cleveland. She was drawn to the cause of peace and justice. She said her time as a student at the University of London gave her a “broader view of who we are.”

In 1988, she was a “witness for peace” in Nicaragua. And she has spent a lot of time in front of the Federal Building in Providence, silently protesting U.S. policy gone wrong.

She is part of that wonderful circle of people who take their beliefs public and work for change — people like Richard Walton, Henry Shelton and Irwin Becker. Becker was chairman of the Fund for Community Progress’ board and urged her to apply for the executive director’s job.

She was hired in June 1993. In 1994, the fund sued the United Way for what it considered unfair practices. The United Way had listed all of the fund’s agencies in a campaign booklet. It took three years, but the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fund. It was a decision that went a long way toward loosening once tight controls on fundraising and philanthropy in Rhode Island.

Voll had been director of communications at Lesley University in Cambridge. It was a good job but a horrible daily commute. And it took her away from the kind of community activism on which she thrived.

She had told her children that once they were out of college she would join the Peace Corps. But then along came the Fund for Community Progress and good, hard-working years of taking the case for change to wherever it needed to be heard. Issues such as affordable housing were in the mix at the fund long before they were embraced by political leaders.

She leaves the fund with twice as many member agencies as it had when she arrived. She leaves at the age of 71. She has four grandchildren she will have more time for.

Maybe. Part of Nondas Voll’s retirement is being director of The Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence.

It is an unpaid position.