2012 Meeting Report: Managing for Mission

National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

5 Opening Prayer

5 Welcome and Introduction

Kerry Robinson, Executive Director, The Leadership Roundtable

6 Leadership Roundtable Year in Review

Kerry Robinson, Rev. Paul Holmes, Geoffrey Boisi, B.J. Cassin

17 Observations from a Lifetime of Land Navigation

James Dubik, Lt. Gen. (Ret.), US Army

25 2012 Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Awards

33 Partnership: An Inevitability

Carolyn Woo, President and CEO, Catholic Relief Services

37 Connecting with Today’s Funders: Observations from an Investor Charles Harris, Founder, SeaChange Capital Partners

45 The Era of Assumed Virtue is Over: The New Normal Robert Ottenhoff, President and CEO, GuideStar

51 Strategic Collaborations to Strengthen the Church

Dennis Cheesebrow, President, TeamWorks, Int’l.

57 Appendix 1- 2012 Annual Meeting Presenter and Facilitator Biographies

59 Appendix 2- 2012 Annual Meeting Participant Biographies

63 Appendix 3- Publications

This publication is a collection of the wisdom, insights, observations, and exchange of ideas from participants at Managing for Mission: Building Strategic Collaborations to Strengthen the Church.

In June 2012 the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management convened leaders from the Church and secular fields at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to address contemporary challenges facing the Catholic Church and to consider a set of questions related to partnership and collaboration. Included in this book are excerpts from the panels and presentations, as well as selected questions, answers, and insights from a wide range of Annual Meeting participants.

You are encouraged to learn more and continue the conversation online. Visit www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting for on-demand video presentations of all speakers and panelists, an electronic copy of this publication, as well as supplemental materials including the mirco-biographies of all participants, a detailed agenda, and other information pertinent to the meeting.

To join the continuing conversation, visit the Catholic Standards for Excellence Online Forum at www.CatholicStandardsForum.org where workgroup findings are posted and updated.

MANAGING FOR MISSION: BUILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH COPYRIGHT 2012 THE NATIONAL LEADERSHIP ROUNDTABLE ON CHURCH MANAGEMENT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN, EDITOR. PATRICK MCCLAIN, KATHARINE MCKENNA, AND KEVIN WATSON, EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE EMAIL INFO@NLRCM.ORG OR CALL (202) 223-8962.

OPENING PRAYER

Sr. Mary Johnson, SND

Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, Emmanuel College

Loving God, we come to you today in prayer to ask for wisdom, strength, and courage as we face multiple challenges in our Church, in our country, and in our world. Bless, in a particular way, our deliberations here today and tomorrow. We seek to hear your word, to follow your truth, and to minister in your name to all who need your love and care, particularly your beloved poor. We ask this in the name of our brother and Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Kerry Robinson Executive Director, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

We have two purposes for gathering annually. The first is that we want to give a proper account of the services that we have developed and the programs that we have put in place to respond to the temporal challenges facing Church leaders in the United States. So it is our way of being accountable to our members and showing you how we are properly utilizing your intellectual contributions to our mission. Our second purpose is to highlight a particular opportunity or challenge facing the Church and to bring brilliant men and women—ordained, religious, and lay—together to explore those challenges and come up with effective responses to meet the temporal challenges that we have identified.

In the past, this gathering has taken up such matters as the financial and managerial considerations of organizing a diocese, a parish, or a Catholic nonprofit. We have focused on management, human resource development for the Church, and communications. Two years ago, we took up twin challenges at the time. We examined the ongoing sexual abuse crisis that Europe was experiencing, showcasing some of the

INTRODUCTION TO THE ANNUAL MEETING

fine work that has been done in this country to respond to it as a way of being helpful to our global Church. And we discussed the crisis of the global economic meltdown and how that impacts the health of the Church. Last year we were prevailed upon by bishops and our own members to take up the subject of parochial school systems, specifically to convene experts in the field of Catholic education to focus on the long-term sustainability and health of Catholic school systems, and that resulted in a series of recommendations that we have fine-tuned and are working on now; you will hear some more about that later this afternoon.

This year, of course, our topic is the importance of strategic alliances and partnerships. And the genesis of this, frankly, was the members of the Leadership Roundtable who represent Catholic philanthropic foundations and who are Catholic philanthropists themselves. Since Vatican II, in this country, a number of very prominent Catholic families have been supporting, financially, the creation of Catholic national networks whose own mission has a bearing on ours. They are important life-

giving networks and apostolates to the life of the Church. How you navigate a changing world and allow yourself to be open to risk-taking and strategic alliances for the sake of your own financial sustainability was key in the formulation of our gathering today. And as you see, we have a stellar lineup of keynotes and a set of working sessions, which allows us to capitalize on the fact that any one of you is a keynote in his or her own right. And we will be working you very hard tomorrow for the sake of the common good of the Church.

Kerry Robinson

LEADERSHIP ROUNDTABLE YEAR IN REVIEW

Kerry Robinson Executive Director, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

And now I would like to turn to the first purpose of our meeting, which is a report and account of the work of the Leadership Roundtable. To help me do this, I have three extraordinary men with me, all personal heroes of mine.

The first is Fr. Paul Holmes, who is professor of moral and sacramental theology at Seton Hall University and was the first vice president for mission at the University. It has been a great privilege for the Leadership Roundtable to partner with Seton Hall University and specifically with Fr. Paul Holmes in creating the Toolbox for Pastoral Management, which is offered in a retreat-like setting for six days to new pastors. Bishops from all over the country are sending their priests to this wonderful opportunity.

Next to him is Geoff Boisi, the chairman and CEO of Roundtable Investment Partners, and most importantly, the founder of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management. His leadership, passion, and commitment to the Church, and specifically to the Leadership Roundtable, as a way to be part of the solution is inspiring, and we owe a profound debt of gratitude to him.

And next is B.J. Cassin, chairman and president of Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation. He was formally welcomed onto the board of trustees of the Leadership Roundtable today. He is also the chair of the board of the Cristo Rey Network.

2012 Leadership Roundtable Annual Report

The first thing that I would like to point out to you is, in your packets you have received, hot off the press, our 2012 Annual Report. Our communications manager, Mike O’Loughlin, is responsible for this. It reflects, particularly on the inside, our commitment to measuring the impact and reach, the breadth and depth, of our work on behalf of the Church. We are using this as a baseline, but in every subsequent quarter and year, we will add to this to document where our presence is having a positive impact. Right now we are present in 96 dioceses. We also work with religious orders, men’s and women’s, with national Catholic organizations, and, of course, hospitals, schools, universities, and charities. We take metrics very seriously, and while it’s not always easy to measure the impact that we are making, we are detailing, in a very deliberate way, where we have a presence. What I can assure you is that the demand for what we are offering the Church is growing, and it is our task as a board and as members to manage that in a way that does not sacrifice quality and allows us to be even more beneficial to the Church we love.

Catholic Standards for Excellence Online Forum

Our Catholic Standards for Excellence online forum is a free, interactive online chat room, essentially, and it also provides for the exchange of best practices in the temporal affairs of the Church. We

are using the Forum over the course of these two days. In our breakout sessions, the scribes will be uploading some key insights onto the site. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, we will have an opportunity as participants to go back to the Forum to refine some of the practices, ideas, and suggestions that are offered over the next two days.

As you know, our mission is to promote excellence and best practices in the management, finances, human resource development, and communications of the Catholic Church in the US, with a particular focus on greater incorporation of the expertise of the laity. You have heard me, many times, note that the Catholic laity have risen to levels of affluence and influence, and count among the highest echelons of leadership across every sector and industry in the United States. We would be failing in our basic Christian stewardship if we were not, as a Church, to avail ourselves of that talent and expertise. This is why, ladies and gentlemen, you have been invited here today, and I am so grateful to you.

“ As you know, our mission is to promote excellence in best practices, in the management, finances, human resource development, and communications of the Catholic Church in the US, with a particular focus on greater incorporation of the expertise of the laity.”

The Four Columns of Leadership Roundtable Growth

In March of this year, anticipating our seventh anniversary on July 11th, next month, we took stock of all that the Leadership Roundtable, with your support, has created to respond to temporal challenges facing the Church. And we took a deep breath and marveled at what we had, in fact, created. Then we acknowledged that the Leadership Roundtable is no longer an experiment, but is, in fact, a very important resource in service to the Church, particularly because of its laser focus on temporal challenges. It avoids the neuralgic issues that tend to divide and separate Catholics, and we harness what we do best, which is to strengthen the management, finance, and human resource development of the Church. And with the confidence that we were on to a great thing and had something wonderful to continue to offer the Church, we unveiled our vision for the next few years, and that includes strengthening our offering in four areas, which my fellow panelists will be addressing.

1. The first column is what we have always done; namely, to develop specific solutions to the challenges that keep Church leaders up at night. This column includes all of our signature services and programs.

2. The second column is a focus on identifying the top 50 families,

foundations, and individuals who are committed in a very serious philanthropic way to supporting the Catholic Church. We want to identify these 50 by region. There’s increasing demand, so we need resources in order to disseminate our programs properly across the country. We recognize that there is something profoundly important about the intersection of Catholic financial capital and Catholic intellectual capital, and when you bring those two together, you create a lay force to be reckoned with that is profoundly faithful and profoundly effective. We don’t just want to identify these top 50 families and individuals to support the Leadership Roundtable, though, because we know that with their experience of philanthropy comes a great experience and bird’s eye views of some of the important needs facing the Church.

3. The third column is the Leadership Roundtable schools initiative. B.J. will be addressing that later this afternoon to update you on how the Leadership Roundtable can take its particular area of expertise and lend that in service to the challenge that all Church leaders are facing with respect to the long-term sustainability and health of Catholic parochial school systems.

4. And the fourth column is an investment initiative that Geoff Boisi will explain. The idea came out of a conversation in 2008 at the start of the economic crisis from a conversation that Geoff and I had

with Cardinal George, who was then the president of the US Bishop’s Conference. Cardinal George asked the Leadership Roundtable specifically for assistance in helping bishops safeguard and strengthen Church assets in an uncertain economic period. One of five suggestions that we have developed for the bishops and other Church leaders to consider is the idea of strategic investing.

Toolbox for Pastoral Management

Rev. Paul Holmes, STD

Distinguished University Professor of Servant Leadership, Seton Hall University Program Coordinator, The Toolbox for Pastoral Management

This is my first time at a Leadership Roundtable Annual Meeting. I’ve been working with the Leadership Roundtable for three years and I’m very, very excited to be with you. I have an announcement that I should make before I begin. I am the happiest priest you will ever meet. I know there are my brother priests in

the audience, but I’m sorry. This position is taken, and it is mine. Why am I the happiest priest you’ll ever want to meet?

Well, I only have 10 minutes, so I can’t tell you everything. What I can tell you is this: there are few things as rewarding as working on a project harder than you’ve worked on anything and having it turn out to be a magnificent way to help one’s brother priests. The Toolbox for Pastoral Management is that for me.

We bring in 15 experts and invite 30 priests for a week in a retreat-like setting. There’s morning prayer, evening prayer, and the celebration of the Eucharist. We have adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and confessions. But in the midst of all of that, the priests participate in 15 presentations, which are very, very interactive. We bring these experts in from all over the country on subjects as varied as internal financial controls, risk management, working with your parish business office, a mission-driven parish, Christian stewardship, human resources 101, building councils, a six-month game plan for a new pastor, Standards for Excellence, creating an evangelizing parish, and a theology of management. These 30 priests, who have just been named pastor, are as nervous about that new identity as

you can imagine. At the end of this week, they feel much more comfortable.

This is what happened. Back in 2006, Tom Healey, the treasurer of the Leadership Roundtable, visited Seton Hall and asked our president, “Can Seton Hall create an executive education experience for new Catholic pastors and give them the administrative skills that they aren’t taught in seminary but skills they’ll need to be successful pastoral leaders in the 21st century?” We said yes, and I worked with Tom Healey, and with the Leadership Roundtable’s John Eriksen, Michael Brough, Jim Lundholm-Eades, Kerry Robinson, and other dedicated members.

contacted me is because there isn’t even room at the retreat center. Otherwise, I might start just putting up cots on the beach, because there’s a great deal of excitement that we learn about through emails and telephone calls. This Toolbox in July has 38 priests from 18 different dioceses, and it includes a Canadian and even an Armenian. This is the first time we’ve had someone from one of our sister Eastern Churches.

Since Tom Healey’s first meeting at Seton Hall six years ago, we have edited the 15 Toolbox presentations and submitted them to a publisher so that there might one day be an easy-to-read how-to manual

“ ese 30 priests, who have just been named pastor, are as nervous about that new identity as you can imagine. At the end of this week, they feel much more comfortable.”

We came up with 70 potential learning outcomes. What would we want our new pastors to know at the end of this week? And we started small. We thought, “Let’s start with region three, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” As it turned out, by the time we opened our first Toolbox, we had new pastors not only from Newark, Patterson, Camden, and Metuchen, NJ, and Allentown and Harrisburg, PA, but because of the great deal of work done by the Leadership Roundtable, we had men from as far away as New Orleans, Houston, and St. Petersburg, FL.

And today, four years later, we are about two weeks away from our fifth Toolbox for Pastoral Management. We’re oversubscribed, which is a wonderful thing. The only reason I’ve started to say no to some of the priests who have

for new pastors. We wrote a proposal to Lilly Endowment, Inc., who so loved it that they provided a very generous grant that has allowed us to do two Toolboxes a year and to take the Toolbox on the road. We meet not just at the Jersey Shore, but are able to bring the Toolbox to various places in the country. Our first such non-New Jersey toolbox was held last January in Jacksonville, FL. Bishop Estevez and

“

allows the learning that takes place at the Toolbox to continue and turn into lifelong learning. ”

Fr. Paul Holmes

the Diocese of St. Augustine were so hospitable I considered incardinating into his diocese.

CatholicPastor.org

What makes the Toolbox different and, I daresay, better than other new pastor workshops is CatholicPastor.org, an online virtual community of practice that allows priests from all over the country to share best practices and creative ideas of all kinds. It’s maintained by Fr. Frank Donio, SAC, and Alex Boucher, who are here with us today. It’s modeled on what Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jim Dubik of the Leadership Roundtable helped create for Army captains in Iraq, allowing captains all over Iraq to talk to one another without their bosses listening in, and talking about what they’re finding difficult as captains, and ask candidly, Does somebody know a better way? CatholicPastor.org is doing the same for priests all over America. It allows the learning that takes place at the Toolbox to continue and turn into lifelong learning. And as a professor, I’m very, very excited about that.

Toolbox for Pastoral Management Assessment

“ We also observed that if we could start to pool the resources of some of the major philanthropic leaders of our country who were devoted to Catholic activities, we could maximize impact and effectiveness of the programs that we all support.”

for Pastoral Management is a huge, unmitigated, flabbergasting success. That’s the only kind of thing I like to be involved with. By the end of July, when we have our fifth Toolbox, we will have offered the Toolbox to 143 pastors from 38 dioceses and brought over 30 expert presenters from nearly 20 different dioceses around the country. And we’ve begun work with Seton Hall’s technology experts to convert our 15 face-to-face presentations into online self-paced modules which can reach the other 35,000 priests in the United States.

Catholic Philanthropic Leadership Consortium

Geoffrey Boisi Chair and CEO, Roundtable Investment Partners, LLC Chair, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

vision of the providers of capital and the users of capital. We observe the same thing in the Catholic community. And we thought that a smart thing for us to do would be to bring a group of philanthropic leaders together for the purpose of coordination and synchronization, and exposing their strategic vision as to what was important to the Catholic Church in the United States.

In addition, we have submitted everything to an external assessment consultant who was given free rein to survey the participants from the first four Toolboxes, fly in a group of them to Chicago for a full-day forum, do a structured telephone interview with a randomly selected cohort of Toolbox graduates, and write a formal assessment of all of our work.

I will try to remain as humble as possible, but it turns out that the Toolbox

Let me offer a couple of thoughts on the Catholic Philanthropic Leadership Consortium. My 93-year-old father, a devout Catholic, lawyer, businessman, taught me years ago the two definitions of the golden rule. The first he said, is to love thy neighbor as yourself. The second, he said, he who has the gold rules.

Those of us who have been active in philanthropy have observed over the last number of years that there has been a disconnect between the strategy and

We also observed that if we could start to pool the resources of some of the major philanthropic leaders of our country who were devoted to Catholic activities, we could maximize impact and effectiveness of the programs that we all support. We want to develop a forum where we can develop focused agreement on what defines success in these various programs. We want to develop accountability for results, and effective, efficient use of the scarce capital that’s out there. The ultimate goal is to have, initially, 50 families—I’d like to see us

Geoff Boisi]

ultimately get to 100 families— and to have representation in each of the 15 regions around the country.

By developing this sort of strategic think-tank, we will develop greater communication between the philanthropists and then the program developers. And that, essentially, is the concept behind the Consortium. But it will also ingrain the notion of investment, not just giving, but investment into the strategic initiatives that we believe can move the dial for the Church’s mission in the US. We have started to reach out and have received very, very positive reaction from some of the major families in the country already, and we’re looking forward to our first meeting in September.

Catholic Schools Initiative

B.J. Cassin

President, Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation Trustee, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

As Kerry indicated, some bishops asked the Leadership Roundtable to convene a meeting relative to Catholic schools. And those of you who attended last year, From Aspirations to Action: Solutions for

“ But it will also ingrain the notion of investment, not just giving, but investment into the strategic initiatives that we believe can move the dial for the Church’s mission in the US.”

America’s Catholic Schools, it was a very lively group of discussions that we had, out of which came 92 aspirations. It’s taken some time putting together some stakeholders to boil those down to what is realistic and what is the most effective way that the Leadership Roundtable, with its resources, would be able to implement. So it went from 92 down to 20, then down to 8 that were presented to the Leadership Roundtable board in March, which they approved. We’re in the process now of actually pulling together business plans on 6 of those, getting the proper staff in place and the proper financial resources so these can, in fact, become actions. John Eriksen will rejoin the Leadership Roundtable this summer, and he will be leading this effort from the staff standpoint.

Pooled Strategic Investment

Geoffrey Boisi

In terms of the investment partnership that we’ve been developing, the average US household saw that its net worth fell approximately 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. Three out of 5 parishes report that their parish income declined as a result

of the economic crisis. Forty percent of parish leaders report that the current financial health of their parish is tight, but barely manageable. And that’s up from 9 percent only 5 years ago.

In general, churches in the United States saw their contributions drop by $1.2 billion in 2010, up from a drop of $431 million in 2009. So you can see the increase in the financial stress. Eighty-five percent of nonprofits in the US saw an increase in demand for their services in 2011, and 57 percent of nonprofits have three months or less cash on hand. And if that’s not enough, total membership in the 25 largest churches has decreased. The Catholic Church, even though we’ve had tremendous buoyancy from the Latino community, still as a Church, membership has dropped over half of a percent, and that’s a big number when you consider 65 million people.

As a result of that, over the last two years we’ve been working very hard with a couple of other organizations to put together an organized investment partnership. What we’re trying to do is accomplish a little bit what the Carnegie Foundation, Yale University, Harvard, and some of the other major institutions have done in pooling together capital.

This happens to be the 100th anniversary of Andrew Carnegie taking $100 million in 1911 and investing it. For the first 75 years, all they did was put that in bonds. They lost purchasing power during that period of time. In the early 1970s, they started to go to a 60 percent/40 percent weighting of stocks to bonds. And they got it up to $187 million in the early 1980s. But then they started to use sophisticated investment asset allocation, going after and identifying best of breed money

B.J. Cassin

“ Our objectives were to develop a program that would assist the financial stability of the Catholic Church; to successfully execute its mission through more professional, sophisticated, productive management of its capital base on a national basis; and create a world-class investment management partnership among Catholic affinity groups and individuals with consistent top-tier performance that commands the respect of all.”

managers around the world. They grew that $187 million to close to $2.7 billion today, after investing an additional $2.6 billion over that period of time in grants. And that, basically, was by compounding, leaving the capital in and compounding it by approximately 10 percent a year over that 25- to 30-year period of time.

We thought that this approach would be particularly attractive for the Catholic community, as it has been for Episcopalians, Lutherans, and some Jewish communities. We’ve been working with a few other organizations to identify a program that could achieve similar results to these major institutions for the Catholic Church. If we could perform anywhere near like those organizations, the Church would be utilizing its capital at 500 to 600 basis points annually better than that 60/40 kind of allocation.

Our objectives were to develop a program that would assist the financial stability of the Catholic Church; to successfully execute its mission through more professional, sophisticated, productive management of its capital base on a national basis; and create a world-class investment management partnership among Catholic affinity groups and individuals with consistent top-tier performance that commands the respect of all.

We would accomplish this through the utilization of a more nuanced approach to Catholic socially responsible investment principles, providing a spectrum of socially responsible investment principles for all the organizations given their level of discipline that they want to apply to SRI investment; develop a brand recognition for excellence and trust through the attraction and development of the highest quality talent; and utilization of the most sophisticated investment solutions that are responsive to client needs and offered on a cost-effective basis.

By pooling capital together, we can get performance up and costs down, and then become the investment option of choice for the Catholic market.

We’re very hopeful that, within the next couple of months, we’ll be coming forth to the market with a significant amount of capital to achieve this goal. And we think it can make a major contribution to the Church in the US.

SELECTED QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND INSIGHTS

Pooled Investment Strategy

Patrick Carolan

Executive Director Franciscan Action Network

My organization does a lot of work on social justice issues, such as immigration reform. We discovered there is a lot of money that’s invested by faith-based organizations in private prisons. So I’m wondering, how are you going to balance a good return on the money with the concerns of the Church? Have you reached out to people like Sr. Nora Nash or Fr. Michael Crosby who have done a tremendous amount of work in this area of social investing and investing based on Catholic social teachings?

Geoffrey Boisi

This is a very important issue and one we’re addressing with Christian Brothers Investment Services, who have been a leader in the area of socially responsible investing, and we’ve also reached out to other institutions, Catholic institutions, and, frankly, there are some that are extremely interested and disciplined in their SRI investing. What we want to do in developing this is to create a menu of

options for people. Anything that goes into a pooled vehicle will be scrutinized and we’ve been working with a variety of organizations to make sure that we are scrupulous to avoid the kinds of things that you were talking about. One of the reasons why we want to work with the Christian Brothers is the work that they’ve done in this area. But there are other Catholic Institutions that have a different perspective and we think that there needs to be a spectrum of options for everybody within the community.

Joan Neal

Vice President of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness, Cabrini College

Is there a list of the investment advisors and managers, and could you talk a little bit about the screen that you apply to the selection of these managers?

Geoffrey Boisi

We’re in the midst of developing all of this. As you can tell, it’s a very complex formulation to put this together, to make it work. We’ve been interviewing a number of different screening organizations to look

at the different issues that are Catholic related to make sure that we are not investing in anything that is inappropriate. We’ve been working with Christian Brothers at one end of the spectrum, and, as we go down that path, there is what I would call a slightly more nuanced approach to it, where if any organization has less than 3 percent of revenues or if 3 percent of the overall portfolio was in something that might be potentially neuralgic, it would get kicked out. We’ve developed multiple screens that would be utilized several times each year to ensure that there is a scrupulous approach to making sure any inappropriate investment was discontinued.

Fred Fosnacht Founder

My Catholic Voice

Have you determined the criteria for participation?

Geoffrey Boisi

The hope is to create a situation where at the parish level, at the Catholic nonprofit organization level, and the diocesan level,

Patrick Carolan

Joan Neal

Fred Fosnacht

that you can have as little as $250,000 to $1 million of participation. You would control those assets, but they would be pooled with other capital of larger organizations. You know, there is some capital that could be invested over a long period of time, and that would have private equity transactions, alternative investments, and that sort of thing, but it would have to stay in that pool for at least a three-year period of time. There will be another pool of capital that would provide either monthly or quarterly liquidity. There will be another pool of capital that has even shorter-term liquidity. And we’re also hoping to have a set of capabilities that could be done by asset class as well.

We’re working through this with the accountants and the lawyers now to create these pools so that we can make sure that everybody receives the correct proportion of return on their investments but with the benefits of being part of a large pool, giving them access to managers who serve institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and the Carnegie Corporation. We hope that the entry level is a modest amount of capital, so that an individual parish that wants to invest $1 million, that would never have the opportunity to invest with the kind of money managers that Notre Dame, Boston College, Georgetown, or Harvard and Yale retain, would now have that access.

Mid-Atlantic Congress

Rev. John Hurley, CSP

Executive

Director

Department of Evangelization

Archdiocese of Baltimore

I want to thank the Leadership Roundtable trustees. Paul Henderson and I both serve as co-chairs for the Mid-Atlantic Congress, and it was a tremendous success last year. It is sponsored by the Association of Catholic Publishers and the Archdiocese of

Baltimore. We drew people last year from 65 dioceses and over 1,400 participants for the first time. We had a very positive experience with the Leadership Roundtable.

So as we look at next year, Michael Brough has been excellent in being a part of our planning committee to have a diocesan leader track and a parish track. Archbishop Lori responded to Kerry’s invitation about having a bishops-only possibility at the conference as well, so I want to thank the Leadership Roundtable for its efforts. I think we’re looking at this as Catholic leaders coming together and how we can celebrate and recognize the best practices among us. And I think you’ve been a key part of that. So, on behalf of the Association of Catholic Publishers and the Archdiocese of Baltimore, thank you.

Toolbox for Pastoral Management

James Donahue President Graduate Theological Union

Has there been any consideration about incorporating aspects of the Toolbox for Pastoral Management into seminary training?

Fr. Paul Holmes

We’ve had many discussions about this. I was on the faculty of the North American College in Rome in 2000, teaching young men how to preach. My archbishop would only release me for a year, so at the end of that year, it is the practice at the college to have the entire faculty and staff meet for an entire week, and invite the new faculty and administrative members who are going to be joining them in September to fly out to Rome for this meeting. The rector, who was Msgr. Timothy Dolan at the time, said, “Paul, you’re here and you’re leaving, so you can say anything you want, and you don’t have to worry about how we’re going to react to it. Is there something that we don’t do that we should be doing?” I said, “You know, we send men home to be pastors, and they don’t know how to hire, fire; they don’t know how to do any of the things that they’re eventually going to have to do.”

When I was ordained 31 years ago, I was told, in Newark, that I wouldn’t be a pastor for 27 years. Men are becoming pastors the day after their ordination today. So, while I would have had three pastors, at least, as an apprenticeship before becoming a pastor back then, new pastors today, whatever their age, are walking into parishes with no training whatsoever in the very skills that they need to be effective pastoral leaders and to bring the people to Christ. So I told that to Msgr. Dolan.

We have the largest seminary in the US at Seton Hall, and I’ve spoken to the rector there. The difficulty, at least with Catholic seminaries, is that there is a very

James Donahue

full program for priestly formation for all Catholic seminaries. There is no more room in a schedule with all the things that seminarians are required to learn. This is shocking. I mean, there’s no room to teach them how to do the things we want them to do. So it would be very difficult to insert opportunities for seminarians to gain these skills. And I’ve accepted that as just a reality that we can all be unhappy with, but at least the Toolbox for Pastoral Management comes in and tries to do what’s missing.

We offer a week to new pastors. Certainly, isn’t there a week in a seminarian’s life over the course of four years, and hopefully close to his ordination, when we could do a week for them, too?

Kerry Robinson

I really appreciate your question, too, because it illustrates a cardinal virtue of the Leadership Roundtable. The first place we went with the Toolbox idea was to the seminaries. It’s the obvious place. We respected their “no,” which is to say they were already full, but we didn’t let that stop us from meeting the unmet need. And really, the Toolbox for Pastoral Management was created to get past that “no.” And what I see happening is seminaries are starting to come to Fr. Paul and say, “Could we maybe introduce the Standards for Excellence somewhere in our curriculum?” So we never give up.

Fr. Paul Holmes

I was just reading the magazine that comes out four times a year from the North American College. On one of its pages it describes experiences

during their pastoral education where seminarians discuss temporal administration of a parish. And this is the first time I’ve seen any notice of it. It’s sitting on my coffee table. I plan on writing a note to the rector and saying, “Good for you.” It’s important for them.

Geoffrey Boisi

Probably, though, the real answer is that we ought to be identifying lay people who are actually trained and qualified to do that kind of work and give the priests enough background so they can communicate, but the lay professional should be exercising more responsibility in this area.

Fr. Paul Holmes

One of the things we train these new pastors in is, “You are not the messiah. You can’t do all of this. You are going to have to rely on your brothers and sisters in Christ to do their work in building up the Church and helping you manage your parish.”

Rev. John Celichowski

Provincial Minister Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order

I want to encourage you to push back and try to get that into the seminary curriculum. I was named a pastor of a parish in Chicago two weeks after I was ordained in 1993, and I had to learn everything on the fly. I think there are places in the curriculum in the seminary program, even if you’re following the program for priestly formation, to include these things. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I think we have to find a way, because I think we really harm a lot of young priests and discourage them by not teaching these skills. When you look at a lot of the data that’s coming out of CARA and places like that, it shows how many priests leave within the first 5 years of ordination. A large part of it is because they’re thrown into these situations where they’re overwhelmed with administrative tasks. Even the old guys in our province who have been pastors multiple times, they will say 5 masses a day until they die, but they never want to be administrators again. They say, “That’s not why I was ordained.” But some of us don’t have a choice. If you’re in a parish that has a small budget, you can’t hire all these people to do your work, so you got to find a way to do it.

Fr. John Celichowski

William Cahoy Dean

St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary

I think the resistance comes not just from the program for priestly formation but also from students, faculty, and staff. The students will say this is the last thing they’re interested in when they’re in seminary, but when they’re out two years they say, “I was not well-prepared.” These ideas always need a champion in the system, and if there’s some way to get faculty involved in things like this, to appreciate the value of it, you’d have an internal champion who might help to make it happen.

Sustainability of Catholic Schools

Rev. Mr. John Kerrigan

CFO, Santa Clara University

Deacon, Catholic Community at Stanford University

Are there programs here in the US, whether they’re private-to-private, or private-to-public, or outright public

programs, that really excite you and have the potential to be models and drivers for improving the chances of the survivability of Catholic schools, whether broadly or particularly in the inner city?

B.J. Cassin

No matter who gets elected as president, tax reform will undoubtedly be something that’s on the table, and doing the appropriate lobbying to get support of tax credits will be essential. My own personal experience, the Jesuit Nativity School here in Washington, DC, receives about $800,000 from vouchers. The Cleveland Cristo Rey High School and the Tucson Cristo Rey High School, to name two, receive $900,000 to $1 million from the tax credits that the students are able to bring in. So it’s a significant needle mover.

Training is another area where there is need. There are superintendents of schools at various archdioceses who are there for two years, three years, or four years. And there is a need for comprehensive training programs for them, perhaps similar to the Toolbox for Pastoral Management.

Bill Cahoy

John Kerrigan

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

OBSERVATIONS FROM A LIFETIME OF LAND NAVIGATION

James Dubik

Lt. Gen. (Ret.), US Army Trustee, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

As I was thinking about the themes of this conference, adopting structures that will serve us in the twenty-first century, renewing managerial practices, and collaboration, the thing that kept coming back to my mind was land navigation. And I thought, boy, that is really weird. Why am I having these memories of land navigation? But I stuck with it, and I hope by the end of my few minutes that you will come to realize why this stuck in my mind.

Panama

I was a brand-new lieutenant in the early 1970s, and I parachuted into Panama with four hundred other guys. We jumped into

a jungle clearing, and we were supposed to link up on the side of the drop zone and then infiltrate from the drop zone in small groups to a place where we were going to practice some kind of raid on an enemy facility. The jump went fine, we had very few injuries, and most of us landed on the drop zone. We all linked up together, and we broke down in our little groups and took off. As a junior officer, I was assigned with two other junior officers as one of the three people on the navigation team for our group. Of course, our group included the battalion commander and several other senior leaders, so we were a little nervous.

It was nighttime. Nothing really interesting in the Army happens during the day. So we jumped in at night, and I should say that it was so dark that sometimes, literally, you had to hold onto the person in front of you. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean grab the equipment of the person in front of you so you could follow where that person went.

So we set off. Since this was 1974 or 1975, there were no night vision goggles, so we couldn’t see anything. There were no global positioning systems. And the way you move through the jungle most of the time is you throw your body against the jungle. You back up, take two steps forward, throw your body against the jungle, and you do this for many, many hours. It’s very tiring.

After 7 or 8 hours of doing this we were supposed to have been at a river. We were not. And not only were we not at a river, we were at a swamp. And it wasn’t one of those swamps that precedes a river.

So we sat down, and one of the other members of the group said, “I’ll go forward.” So he goes forward into the night, and all you hear is squishing sounds and then, after a few seconds, “Pull me out!” So the two of us crawl out on our stomachs. We grab him; we pull him out. And now we’re sitting. What the heck are we going to do? Our plan was to use

Jim Dubik

something called the box method. This is an example where theory and practice don’t match, but this is the theory: you go 90 steps this way until you pass the swamp, then you turn 90 degrees until you pass the swamp. You keep track of the number of steps. Then you turn 90 degrees, keep track of the number of steps. And theoretically, you’re on the other side of the swamp.

So we’re figuring this out, these three lieutenants and I, and the battalion commander is unhappy with how long his lieutenants are taking in leading the team. We can hear him thrashing through the jungle trying to get to us: thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash. And he sits down. He says, “What are you guys doing?” Trying to yell, but whispering at the same time. We say, “Well, sir, we hit a swamp.” “No kidding. This is the jungle. There are swamps everywhere. Just go forward. Follow me.”

And about two seconds later it’s, “Hey, pull me out.”

So two of us go back. We pull him out. Then he says, “Let’s go around it.” “Good idea, sir. We’re going to go around it.”

So we did this. We took the 90 degrees, we counted our steps, throwing ourselves against the jungle for another three hours. And we ended up at 90-90-90, and we were really lost then. The sun came up. We had been walking all night, and we were nowhere near where we were supposed to be. In fact, it took us another day and night to get where we were supposed to be the first night.

Now, we all had maps and compasses. And while it was a funny story, we were all pretty experienced navigators. But at nighttime in the jungle, the map is nearly useless, because you can’t see the terrain features and then identify the terrain fea -

tures to the map to know where you are. Hold that thought.

Haiti

Let’s fast-forward 18 years. I’m a colonel, and I’m leading a brigade combat team into Haiti in 1994 to reseat President Aristide and his government. And my unit was inserted on a partially finished airfield in northern Haiti where my headquarters would be, and then we were going to be responsible for reseating the government in northern Haiti. We had great maps, I’m happy to report, on this one. They showed all the terrain features, where the little villages were, where the roads, the bridges, where the mountains were. And this time, we were inserted during the day. So we even knew where we were, and we had no trouble, you know, getting around. But we still had this huge navigation problem. The maps that we were given didn’t show the terrain that we really needed to understand to accomplish our mission. The physical and geographic features didn’t matter. They were important, but they were much less important. What we needed to know was social, political, cultural, and religious kinds of questions. Who opposed Aristide? Who supported Cedras? Who was provoking all the violence that we came to stop? Who were the Aristide supporters that we could maybe count on?

You would think that before we went into Haiti we would have had those answers, but we did not. There were two weeks from the time that my brigade combat team was alerted to the time that I was sitting in Haiti wondering all these things.

Iraq

And now fast-forward 13 more years to 2007. I’m now a three-star general sent to Iraq with Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus to execute the change in policy that is commonly known as “the

surge.” I arrived there in May of 2007, about three months prior to the height of the violence, and the violence was pretty high. And all the headlines in the newspapers in the spring of 2007 were negative. It was inevitable that we were going to lose, that we were going to be thrown out of the country, that we would have an ignominious withdrawal of US forces, the first in a long, long time. The counteroffensive that had begun had shown no signs of progress in the summer of 2007 and we weren’t sure how things were going to turn out at all.

The job of the organization that I was put in charge of was at this time to accelerate the growth of the Iraqi army and police forces in not just size, but in capability and in confidence so that when the coalition’s counteroffensive was completed they could handle the security in their country and we could leave. The task was to create and expand these forces and the ministries of defense and interior, because that’s how you build a self-sustaining force. This was while the war was going on, before we knew who was going to win, at the height of sectarian violence, and before Prime Minister Maliki really formed a government.

You know, there’s that old commercial of building an aircraft while in flight. Well, our aircraft was not only being built in flight, it was being shot at while it was being built and flown and crewed by people who had never done that before. So the issue at hand here was the plan that we had inherited was just flat not working. The security forces were not growing. In some parts of the country they refused to leave their home provinces. In some parts of the country they refused to fight. In other parts they were in collusion with the insurgents, whether Sunni or other sectarian militias. And we needed a new plan, and we needed a new plan fast.

“

ose who believe that leaders are supposed to have all the answers, those who believe that leaders do all the thinking and that followers merely do what they’re told, these kinds of leaders in the situations, whether it’s a Panama-like, Haiti-like, or Iraqi-like, become much more authoritative and much more centralized. ey aggregate more and more decisions to themselves.”

So, yet again in my career, I had a navigation problem. This time, you know, we weren’t just in the dark. This time, we didn’t have the wrong map. This time, there was no map at all.

What I’ve presented is three different kinds of navigation problems, one in Panama, in Haiti, and in Iraq. And I would bet that each of you has had similar experiences. I mean, haven’t you, at one point or another, even right now, felt that you have a map but you can’t see the features that should guide your thinking? That you can’t see around you, that you’re in the dark, maybe not physically, but you’re in the dark conceptually, because you can’t figure out where you are? Haven’t you, at some point or another, felt that your map or the map that your organization is using is incomplete or has the wrong terrain features, the wrong prominent terrain features, so that you can’t quite seem to make the right decision at the right time? And haven’t you felt sometimes that you’ve been asked to do things in your organization right now that there’s no map at all to follow? I think, given the pace of change and given the depth and the breadth of change and the complexity of all the environments that we face, regardless of professional sector, any honest answer to those three questions

is, “Yes, yes, and yes.” You can get lost in more ways than being stuck in the swamp in Panama.

Successful Leadership in Difficult Situations

So what does a leader do in these kinds of circumstances? That’s really the issue. I’m going to provide at least one answer from my perspective, but, before I do that, I want to be clear about one thing as leaders. The led know when you’re lost. There’s no fooling them. And whether you’re like me, a lieutenant, under a poncho at night, because you have to put a poncho up, get your flashlight out, trying to see where you are, and every private and sergeant around me is saying, “Well, we know what’s going on. The lieutenant is lost.”

The same goes on in every one of your organizations. You cannot fool your followers. So none of us are paid to solve what I’ll call routine problems, problems that recur so often that you have a standard operating procedure to follow them. We’re paid to solve problems that have no answers, or answers that are so temporary that you have to keep adapting as the circumstance is changing. So, with that in mind now, what should leaders do? My answer is that it depends on how

you view yourself as a leader. Those who believe that leaders are supposed to have all the answers, those who believe that leaders do all the thinking and that followers merely do what they’re told, these kinds of leaders in the situations, whether it’s a Panama-like, Haiti-like, or Iraqi-like, become much more authoritative and much more centralized. They aggregate more and more decisions to themselves. Under conditions of ambiguity, like the ones I presented, organizations led by these kinds of leaders generally follow one of four paths. Path number one: the organization could move forward. They accomplish all your objectives, because the leaders have figured it out very quickly and issued orders and the followers execute. We call this in the Army “dumb luck.” This doesn’t happen very often.

More likely, the second path an organization like this takes is that the organization stands still. It’s like me under my poncho, everybody else laying down wondering, “What’s the lieutenant doing under there?” The organization goes nowhere while the leader tries to figure out where he is, where the organization is, and how to move forward. And if this stagnancy goes on long enough, members lose confidence not just in the leadership, but they lose commitment to their organization.

The third path that leaders who are more centralized and authoritative may take is what I’ll call spinning their wheels. There’s lots of movement. Everybody’s busy and everybody’s tired at the end of the day. There’s lots of activity, but there’s no movement forward. The leader is issuing a lot of instructions, but of course, the leader has no idea where the organization is or where it’s going, but he’s doing leadership stuff. He’s telling people what to do, and everybody’s working and busy. But they’re not going anywhere at all. Here, again,

“ Sometimes the best ideas come from those closest to the problem. You don’t look up to find answers; you look down to find answers.”

leadership and the organization become irrelevant. Commitment fades away.

And then the last path is that the organization moves forward in spite of the leaders, where somehow the followers just give lip service to the leaders and take charge. They do what has to be done. But in the process, the organization becomes dysfunctional because there’s this huge gap between what the leader is saying and what the organization is doing. And I could tell a million stories where Army organizations would get orders from their commanders and do what they knew had to be done, and the leader was so incompetent he just followed along as a follower. So this kind of organization does exist. And under conditions of ambiguity, the more complex the navigation problem is, the greater the uncertainty, the more likely an organization led by an authoritative centralized leader goes to options two, three, and four.

There’s another alternative, though. If you’re the kind of leader that says, “Look, I’m the leader, and I am responsible. We are lost. I’ve got to figure this out, but

I can leverage others in figuring it out.”

This is an entirely different answer to the question, “What do leaders do?” And by others, I mean subordinates, peers, and seniors alike. Then the possibilities become something different. When you’re lost like you are in Panama, rather than going under your poncho, you’d send three people out that way, and say “Go 400 meters, 90 degrees that way, tell me what you see. Go that way and tell me what you see. Go that way and tell me what you see. Come back, tell me what you saw, and then let’s find a place on the map that meets all those four locations.” This increases the probability that you’ll find out where you are and increases the probability that you’re going to move forward in the direction that you want to go.

When the map is incomplete, there’s a similar set of activities. The leader starts, first, identifying with others what information he or she needs. Sometimes the best ideas come from those closest to the problem. You don’t look up to find answers; you look down to find answers. In this case, again, the result increases the probability that you’ll identify the right information requirements and increase the probability that you’ll find the right answers to those information requirements, figure out where your organization is, and move forward.

If the leader has no map at all then the leader of the second category taps into the corporate brain of the whole organization, of members, of subordinates, of peers, of seniors, of coalition partners,

of Iraqis, etc. You then find out how to build a map that is good enough, and then use that same set of people to adapt as you move forward, reinforcing things that are going right and identifying very quickly stuff that is not working, and changing it around. So leadership becomes a more corporate kind of affair in those kinds of situations.

In sum, from my view, the leaders of the first category fear admitting that they’re lost. Leaders in the second category already know their followers know they’re lost. Leaders of the first category insulate themselves where leaders of the second category collaborate. Leaders of the first category think that leadership is a zero-sum game. Leaders of the second category know that leadership shared is leadership increased. And when in conditions of uncertainty, leaders of the first category decrease the probability of success; leaders of the second category increase the probability of success.

In today’s kind of fast-paced, changing world, successful leaders collaborate more than their predecessors and they adapt their organizations more often than their predecessors. Organizations without those kinds of leaders are at risk. Darwin’s is not just a theory about biological evolution. It has organizational implications. Organizations die if they can’t adapt. And we all get lost to one degree or another. That’s not the issue. The issue is, “What do you do when you’re lost?”

“ In today’s kind of fast-paced, changing world, successful leaders collaborate more than their predecessors and they adapt their organizations more often than their predecessors.”

SELECTED QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND INSIGHTS

QUESTION

What are some of the key challenges you took away from trying to collaborate with a sort of amorphous group? And what are the things you have to do to really make that work?

Jim Dubik

First, you have to recognize that you must collaborate. Don’t get under the poncho. Second, you have to respect that other people may have answers that you have never thought of, and you have to throw rank away. Good ideas don’t have rank. They’re good ideas because they’re good ideas, not because they came from someone. Third, it’s an issue of time management. Because there are so many people with whom to collaborate, the rhythm of meetings that you set up and the way you manage your time will either allow you to collaborate or be an obstacle to collaboration.

Paul Henderson Director of Planning and Communications

US Conference of Catholic Bishops

How do we make sure that we are making right decisions, but also that the people we’re choosing to collaborate with represent a broad spectrum and it doesn’t end up being group-think?

Jim Dubik

From my experience in the Army, many of our leaders understand collaboration as, “I take my answer to a meeting and convince everyone else it’s right.” That’s not collaboration. Another misunderstanding of collaboration is, “I’m going to get the people who agree with me in a meeting, and then we’re going to talk about my right answer.” Again, that’s not collaboration. If you’re not humble enough to understand that you don’t know the answer and you start from that base, you’re not going to collaborate. You’re going to be in one of these other false modes of collaboration.

So the first is being intellectually honest with yourself and humble enough to say, “Look, I don’t know this.” I can’t tell you how many times in Iraq I’ve said, “Look, you think I know the answer? Why did I call this meeting? You know, we have to figure out the best answer that we can possibly figure out. Then, if it works, fine. If it doesn’t, we’ll adapt it.” You have to respect the fact that others’ experience is equally valid as yours.

If you have a staff with limited imagination, you’re not going to get broad alternative courses of action. And this is where the leader’s responsibility is to seek out the alternatives his or her staff will not give him or her. So you go talk to your

subordinates. While the staff is squirreling away doing staff things, you go talk to your subordinates. You go talk to the subordinates’ subordinates. You go talk to your peers. You might even have a discussion with your seniors about a similar problem. If you don’t have a commander who’s willing to put himself or herself out of the staff mode, then you’re always going to be limited to limited courses of action.

Rev. John Hurley, CSP Executive Director

Department of Evangelization, Archdiocese of Baltimore

Most parish management starts with the fact that many fear we have a vocation crisis, which I think is the wrong place to start. I’m a firm believer that we don’t have a vocation crisis in the Church. I think we have a resistance of being open to the Spirit about where the Spirit’s calling us. In learning from that surge paradigm shift

Paul Henderson

Fr. John Hurley, CSP

“

So whether you’re losing a war or losing money or losing priests, crises are opportunities, if you recognize the crisis.”

you discussed, what elements of that can help us in the Church in the United States move to managing for mission rather than managing for vocation crisis?

Jim Dubik

Well, I’ll leave that to you, Father, about whether it’s a vocation crisis or openness to the Spirit. But from my own professional experience in the surge that you asked about, it took near national disaster for the national leaders to realize, “Hey, it’s not working.” When President Bush in 2006 realized they had bet on the wrong direction and they were losing, it took that level of near disaster for them to be open to an alternative solution. As the Chinese would say, opportunity exists in crisis, but only if you recognize it.

The first step is identifying that you are in a crisis, taking ownership for the crisis, and then making yourself open to alternative ways. That sounds simple, doesn’t it? But look how bad things were in Iraq in 2006 versus today and, comparatively, it’s much better. So that’d be the first thing.

In 1992, after the first Gulf War, the Army had to reduce its size by one-third and its budget by 30 percent. That was a significant emotional event in the life of the Army, and forced us to rethink many, many things about the way we’d done business. Ultimately it ended up in our adopting the whole information sphere and digitization and computers and adding all that stuff to our weaponry as part of ways to increase our combat effectiveness while we decreased size and money.

So whether you’re losing a war or losing money or losing priests, crises are opportunities, if you recognize the crisis.

You also must correctly identify problems in the crisis. Identify the problem, understand the problem, describe the problem from as many different standpoints as you can, and then, lastly, own the problem. Don’t kind of push it away. “Well, we don’t really have a problem, it’s the society,” or, you know, what we did when we changed to the volunteer Army, “We can’t get enough volunteers because American people aren’t patriotic enough.” No, that wasn’t the issue at all. We had a problem. We had to solve it. Identifying a problem, describing it, understanding it, and taking ownership of it are, I would say, equally important as taking opportunities that arise out of crises.

Michael Montelongo Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer Sodexo, Inc.

Structurally speaking, can using a deputy, a COO in the corporate world, perhaps help diocese and parishes with capacity management? As an example, one of the points that was made about the management of the Pentagon was to have a fulltime chief management officer, because there was so much on the Secretary of Defense’s plate to be able to handle the policy issues plus the management and leadership of the department. Maybe something like that can perhaps be appropriate for diocese and parishes?

Jim Dubik

In the Army, the amount of staff you’re assigned grows as you go up in rank. But in each one of these, there’s a choice that the commander has to make, and it’s the same as what a pastor has to make or the bishop has to make. What’s my role as a leader? And what’s my role as a manager? They’re related. They’re both inherent to me. They can’t be separated. But what do I do? When I divest day-to-day management to my executive officer or my deputy commander or my COO, I don’t divest it like an arrow. I don’t just shoot it, fire and forget, and it’s gone. You can’t. You have to establish with your executive officer, deputy, COO, so that you meet with that person and his or her key subordinates at a certain period so that the staff feels that they have sufficient claim on your time. This has to be with the right frequency that they can then use their initiative within their intent between those periods. They shouldn’t bother you during these periods. This liberates you to do the leadership stuff, the counseling stuff,

Michael Montelongo

the performance, the observation, the visiting, the battlefield, on the leadership side. So there is a structural part to leadership, just like there’s a time management aspect of leadership. The size and complexity of the structure should be mirrored by the scope of the job. You would expect the global religious community would have a different structure than a local parish.

QUESTION

Are there any strategies, in regards to trying to come up with a common mission and being able to place that mission first?

Jim Dubik

All of us face that challenge of prioritization. As a leader, if you’re unwilling to make priority decisions, then your organization’s going to look more like a diffracted light than a focused light. You’re not going

“

to have laser focus if you don’t set priorities, and that was part of a question I had here before about making a paradigm shift in Baghdad. We had to get a laser focus on three important issues. It’s inherent in the leadership responsibility to set the direction of the organization, set the priorities, set the vision, motivate people, and then have a management structure to keep the organization on that track. That’s why I separate leadership from management, but I can’t separate the execution. Leaders set direction, set vision, motivate and inspire followers, and then set up a management structure that keeps the organization on track. Otherwise, the organization will go the way it wants to go, because all human beings know that they don’t need leaders, that they know more than anybody else.

Leaders set direction, set vision, motivate and inspire followers, and then set up a management structure that keeps the organization on track.”

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

2012 LEADERSHIP ROUNDTABLE

BEST PRACTICES AWARDS

Catholic Charities USA

and Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America

Opening Prayer

Fr. Jack Wall

President, Catholic Extension

Trustee, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

Come, Spirit of God. Fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in us this night the fire of your love. Hover over this festive night and invade our hearts. Infuse us with the gift of wisdom in our deliberations, and

the gift of joy, joy in our celebration, for tonight we honor and pay deep tribute to two wondrous expressions of your life-giving spirit among us. The good and compassionate works of Catholic Charities USA, and the radiant lives of our women religious whose story is so beautifully told in the exhibit, Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America. Spirit of God, we implore you to abundantly bless these two powerful experiences of your transforming love as they passionately and steadfastly give witness to the power, the beauty and the hope of risen life among your people, throughout our country, and especially in the lives of the poor. And Spirit of God, through their witness, we pray that you would strengthen our hearts and heal our wounds and unleash our creativity and renew our commitment to do your work of becoming your blessing into the world. We ask that you bless this food we share that it might become the bond that brings us together. This is our prayer, through Christ our Lord, Amen.

2012 Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Awards

Michael O’Loughlin Communications Manager, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

When the Leadership Roundtable was founded, its leaders were determined to understand the precise nature and com -

Fr. Jack Wall

Mike O’Loughlin

“

e Leadership Roundtable is uniquely situated to solve the temporal challenges facing the Church because we focus solely on solutions and we are able to bring together individuals with varied view points and different ideas to address common challenges.”

plexities of contemporary challenges facing the Church, and to approach these challenges in a positive and hopeful way. In addition to bringing the expertise of the laity from an array of sectors, the Leadership Roundtable seeks out examples of best practices already at work in the Church, practices that promote sound stewardship, transparency, accountability, excellence, and innovation. We then advocate for the widespread adoption of these practices throughout the Church.

A few years ago, at a previous annual meeting, the Catholic journalist and author John Allen said that the Leadership Roundtable is uniquely situated to solve the temporal challenges facing the Church because we focus solely on solutions and we are able to bring together individuals with varied view points and different ideas to address common challenges. Over the years, we’ve been honored to recognize a slate of extraordinary, effective, hopeful, and dynamic individuals, institutions, and organizations, holding up their ministries as examples deserving of praise and emulation. We’re honored to include Catholic Charities USA and Women & Spirit in that group tonight.

Catholic Charities USA

Kerry Robinson

Executive Director, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

It is such a privilege to honor Catholic Charities USA. Ostensibly, we honor and award this best practice plaque to

Catholic Charities USA because of their commitment to collaboration with federal, state, and local governments, with other faith-based and secular non-profits, and because Catholic Charities USA routinely is given the highest marks in terms of management of finances and people.

These are all the values that the Leadership Roundtable exists to promote and serve. But permit me, on a personal level, to speak on behalf of my fellow trustees and staff at the Leadership Roundtable. Were it not for Catholic Charities and the love that is provided in a concrete way every single day across this country through their work and ministry, our Church would be radically impoverished. For all that Catholic Charities does, and the fact that Catholic Charities is an integral part in the largest global humanitarian organization in

the world, we are deeply, deeply grateful. The 2012 Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Award is presented to Catholic Charities USA, honoring its distinguished service to and the advocacy on behalf of the poor and for innovative collaborations and exemplary stewardship of resources.

Fr. Larry Snyder

President Catholic Charities USA

Well, first of all, I’m not quite sure how I can adequately say thank you for this great award. I think half of the honor of receiving an award comes from the recognition of the work that you do and the other half of the honor comes from the organization who gives the award. And I have to say that, since its beginning, I have admired and

From left to right: Geoff Boisi, chair of the Leadership Roundtable; Fr. Larry Snyder and Candy Hill of Catholic Charities USA; and Kerry Robinson, executive director of the Leadership Roundtable.

supported the work of the National Leadership Roundtable. I’m especially pleased with the theme that you have chosen this year, “Managing for Mission: Building Strategic Collaborations to Strengthen the Church.” Catholic Charities could not do what it does without working in a collaborative fashion. The definition is always a good place to start. To collaborate: to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor. To cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one’s country, and especially an occupying force. To cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected.

“ As we look at Catholic social teaching, and the principles that we find, such as dignity and respect for all human beings and a commitment to make the common good a priority, our relationships and responsibilities must be established. We can see in them a mandate to collaborate. ”

You can see why people have a lot of misgivings about collaboration. It’s inherent in the definition that there is tension and there are turf issues, but should that stop us? I don’t think so.

What does nature have to tell us about collaboration? We can look at certain examples, like bees and ants, and we can see for them it is not a matter of thriving, it is a matter of surviving. Now you can contrast that with human beings and how we have an attitude of rugged individualism. Personally, I think rugged individualism is a myth. We are social beings to our very core.

What does our faith and religious values have to tell us about collaboration? As we look at Catholic social teaching, and the principles that we find, such as dignity and respect for all human beings and a commitment to make the common good a priority, our relationships and responsibilities must be established. We can see in them a mandate to collaborate. In Deus Caritas Est we see the threefold responsibility of the Church: evangelization, common sacramental life, and charity to a world in need. All of these require working together. So, we can see that collaboration is a good idea on a practical level. But when we get to the level of faith, then collaboration becomes a mandate.

How have we done with collaboration as American Catholics? We can go back to the beginning of social ministry in the United States, in 1727, when the Ursuline sisters left Paris and came to the city of New Orleans in New France. Remember, that was 50 years before the Declaration of Independence.

How have we done with collaboration as a country? In 1866, the bishops of this country all got together and made this statement: “It is a very melancholy fact, and a very humiliating avowal for us to make, that a very large portion of the vicious and idle youth of our principal cities are the children of Catholic parents.”

Can we write this off as just a group of grumpy old men? Well, before we do let’s take a look at the reality of New York in 1862. Seventy percent of the inmates of public almshouses, 50 percent of the city’s criminals, and 50 percent of those in reformatories all were born in Ireland. At the time, that means they were all Catholic as well. The New York City leaders who were not Catholic referred to them as “so much accumulated refuse.” So what’s the big deal? It reminds us of two things. First, one thing we forget is that for the majority of our history we were and have been an immigrant Church. Even into the early 1900’s, over half of the Catholics in this country were not born here. As an immigrant Church, we were not only a Church who served the poor, we were the poor.

Second, did the immigrants receive a welcome as Catholics in this country? This is another thing that we sometimes forget. There was a deeply rooted prejudice against Catholics in this country. Those of you who have been to the Statue of Liberty in New York City may have read Emma Lazarus’ poem that’s on the base of the statue. The poem says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempesttossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Those words weren’t exactly the experience that most immigrants had, especially Catholic immigrants.

When you recall the words of the bishops in 1866, I think they were a call to action for Catholics. “We are connected to this issue. We need to solve this.” So what did we do? We built systems to respond to this and we got to the point where you could ask what is the largest private education system in the United States; it’s the Catholic education system. The largest healthcare system? The Catholic

“ We have to ask ourselves, “Are we asking the right questions? Are we making the right invitations to this generation? ”

healthcare system. Social service system? Catholic Charities and the other great works done by religious orders.

All of that is to say that we responded to that call to action, and we succeeded, and we continue to succeed today. That is collaboration. It was collaboration out of necessity. The challenges that we face today are different challenges, even though, once again, we cannot put aside the issues that immigrants face in this country. But the point is we’ve done it before, we can do it again. However, as we look at all the great Catholic institutions, we can’t forget that the primary locus, or place, of social ministry is the parish. We as institutions can only do what we do because there is a network, a foundation, of parishes that carry out the day-in-andday-out ministry to neighborhoods and communities. We presuppose that, and I think in most communities, the parish is Catholic collaboration at its best.

Catholic Charities is also called to collaborate in the public square. I’m not going to go into this in any depth, but just to say that our involvement in the public square is ambiguous, controversial, threatening, and it is absolutely necessary. So I give you three resources that help me to try to stay on a clear course. A book by John Dilulio called The Godly Republic: a Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future, in which he tries to capture the mind of the

framers of the Constitution and show that not only did they think there was a place for religious organizations in our society, constitutionally, but they thought it was essential, because they said we are setting out to establish a Godly republic.

The second book, by Professor Stephen Monsma, Pluralism and Freedom: FaithBased Organizations in a Democratic Society, basically gives the historical development of how religious organizations have contributed, and how greatly they have contributed, to our society. And the third book, by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Seek First the Kingdom: Challenging the Culture by Delivering Our Faith, which comes from the spiritual dimension of engaging society. All of these books show that we can agree on the goals. Sometimes we may have different strategies, but we, without a doubt, have a place in the public square.

Some people question exactly how we should engage the public square. There are some voices out there that say we should circle the wagons because we are under attack, that we should withdraw and pull ourselves away from society. Should we, as Catholics, circle the wagons? The last time we did that was about 400 years ago at the Council of Trent and unfortunately it lasted for about 350 years. But the question we have to ask ourselves is, “What is our tradition in the greater scheme of things?” And I think our tradition has been and should be one of engagement.

You can go back to the Acts of the Apostles. When Paul goes to Athens and sees the altar to the unknown God, what does Paul do? Does he just say, “Oh, that’s just their thing”? No, he stands up and says, “People of Athens: engagement, engagement.” I think we’ve been engaged in the public square ever since then. Let us not betray the legacy of those who have gone before us and built what we enjoy today.

We have become complacent about who is going to support the Catholic Church because Catholics have always just supported it. But as we get to this generation, who are very creative and who are very energetic, one of the things that marks them, however, is the fact that there is no loyalty to brands. Affinity means something different to them. Their interest is in causes, and they don’t care who is working in that cause as long as somebody is supporting the cause. Whereas in my generation, you’d work with the Catholics if you were Catholic, and you would support Catholics because you are Catholic.

I think things are going to be different, and we have to ask ourselves, “Are we asking the right questions? Are we making the right invitations to this generation? Is the Church going to be relevant to the issues of today? Are we winning the PR battle with our message? Is the Catholic Church in the media being portrayed as an organization that is principled or that discriminates? Will we be transparent? Will we be accountable?” This is, I think, the great contribution of the National Leadership Roundtable. The Roundtable is leading the way on many issues. The Standards for Excellence program is just for one. We have to be on the forefront of this if we are to be credible in society.

When is a gift not simply a gift? I’ll tell you a story. Since I have been president of Catholic Charities we have moved three times, and each time it’s because we’ve outgrown the building. When we move, we have had to lease the property because we did not have enough capital to actually buy our own building. Then about a year and half ago, I received a call from a lawyer who said to me, “I wanted to talk to you, Father, because my client has died and he’s left you a rather large bequest.” And my response was, “Oh, please, God, let it be $1 million. Let it be $1 million.” So we were talking -- and I

said, “Well, how large would that bequest be?” He said, “Well, I think it’s going to be around $24 million.” Well, “Oh my God!” I said. And he said, “But the really incredible thing here is that the gentleman leaving it to you is a Mormon, and basically he’s had no contact with the Catholic Church, but he knew he was dying of cancer, so he and his daughter spent weeks researching who is really committed to the poor in the United States. They were going to give it to several different organizations, but their research said it’s the Catholics who are committed to the poor and the money’s going to go to Catholic Charities.”

That gave us the money to buy the building that we need to secure our future and to anchor our portfolio. It’s a brand new four-story building. We occupy the top two floors, and rent out the bottom two floors to help pay for the expenses. But, I thought to myself, “This is not enough to honor this man.” So we dedicated the building in his honor and placed his name on our building. In addition, we decided to pay “rent” even though we own the building, and then along with the other two residents rent, we place that money into a fund, the Fry Fund, named after the man who bequeathed the money, and once it reaches $25 million the board will re-donate the money. It will be given out in increments to agencies who are making an impact in reducing poverty, so that Mr. Fry’s legacy is not just brick-and-mortar, but will help reduce poverty through service.

I think we made a truly significant decision. His family was thrilled. I wanted to tell them what we were going to do. Even though the money was given with no strings attached, I still worried that they could say, “We don’t want any old building. My dad wouldn’t want it.” So when I met with them and discussed the plan, they just sat there. I couldn’t tell what their reactions were or what they were thinking. So I went through the whole plan,

and at the end his daughter looked at me and said, “My dad would love this.” She said, “It’s just the kind of leverage that he did his entire life.” I say all this to encourage you to make sure that when opportunities come along that we are resourceful and creative rather than settling for the first thing that comes to mind.

“ So let it never be said that the Church of our day was found lacking in our passion for the mission, and my prayer is that God, who has begun this great work in us, bring it to fruition.”

I leave you with one last thought tonight. As I look at the Church today, and all of our work, I think what we need is inspiration. We must ask ourselves, “What defines us? What defines us as Catholics? An institution or a mission?” I don’t mean to set that up as a dichotomy, because obviously both are necessary, but I truly believe that the institution should serve the mission and not the other way around. But what is society’s perception? I’m afraid in the newspapers I’ve seen lately, they think we’re only concerned about the institution.

So, ultimately, the question is, “Why do we do what we do?” Doubting Thomas, when he encountered the risen Lord his response was, “My Lord and my God.” He wasn’t answering a quiz on a religion test. He was speaking from his heart. Think of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. After encountering Christ, they reflected, “Our hearts were burning, were on fire.” When you go

to the major basilicas in Rome, what are the two statues that are in front of most of the basilicas? As Americans we might think, “Well, in our churches it would be Mary and Joseph!” But in Rome you get Peter and Paul. You get the great disciples of mission. They are probably the two people who have been most passionate about our faith from the beginning. In those churches the message is very clear: we have to be mission and we have to be passionate about it. So let it never be said that the Church of our day was found lacking in our passion for the mission, and my prayer is that God, who has begun this great work in us, bring it to fruition. Again, thank you so much.

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America

Kerry Robinson

It is an incredible honor and privilege for the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management to have in our midst the director of this exhibit, Sr. Helen Garvey, and to be able tonight to bestow our Best Practices Award on Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America. Again, ostensibly, we are honoring this exhibit because it is an example of collaboration between the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Cincinnati Museum Center, and we are further honoring it because of its multimedia platform, and as an example of effective communications and positive public relations as it chronicles the important history of women religious to the Church and to the United States of America.

But permit me a personal note. My spiritual director is a Religious Sister of Mercy and she has long advised me in my lifetime of service to the Church that I should remember what it is I most love about the Church and membership in it. Name it and claim it, and all of the other distractions will fall by the wayside. I have a very, very, very long list of reasons why I love this Church to which

we belong. At the top of that, is our Church’s commitment to charity, to Christian love, and to justice. But right now, in this moment of our Church’s history, if charity and Christian love and justice have a face, it is surely the face of women religious.

My cousin, Patrick McGrory, is the chair of the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities and he is here tonight, a member of the Leadership Roundtable. Patrick and I have talked all of our childhood and young adulthood about why it is we are so committed to the Church. For 70 years through our family’s foundation we have been supporting the work of women religious, not just in this country, but across the globe. Our family is Catholic because of the face of women religious.

When the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management was first formed, July 11th, 2005, our brilliant and talented founding chairman, Geoff Boisi, invited this illustrious group of founding trustees around a roundtable to introduce themselves and to say one sentence about why it is they were committing to the very intense, demanding time commitment, social capital commitment, and financial commitment to participate in the work of what was then an experiment: the Leadership Roundtable. Geoff then asked everyone around the table to introduce themselves. At first I couldn’t understand why Geoff would ask that since they were all such famous people to begin with.

But what was interesting to me was that, without exception, each person, ordained, religious or lay, male or female, commented on the debt of gratitude that each one owed a priest or a woman religious, or a lay leader who had had a profoundly important impact on their own faith and their professional and personal development. They wanted to give back in honor of these wonderful men and women.

“ As one who worked for years with parish councils and dioceses and pastoral councils, I understand the vital need in our Church for the faith, administrative competence, and, yes, the creativity of all the members of the Body of Christ.”

So it is my incredible delight and honor and privilege to have the Leadership Roundtable’s voice honoring women religious by bestowing this award.

The 2012 Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Award is presented to Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America, honoring its visionary leadership in Catholic communications that celebrate the extraordinary history of women religious in America.

Sr. Helen Garvey, BVM

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America

Thank you, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, for setting the course for excellence in Church management. Thank you for once again reasserting the critical role of the laity in the life of the Church. As one who worked for years with parish councils and dioceses and pastoral councils, I understand the vital need in our

Church for the faith, administrative competence, and, yes, the creativity of all the members of the Body of Christ. Sometimes, at a late hour, when a parish council was debating the color to paint the rectory dining room, instead of focusing on the vision for the parish, I would simply pray, “God give us an administrator.”

I think that our parish leadership is so committed to pastoral care and sacramental life, very often they do not have the administrative help they need. But now the National Leadership Roundtable has come to their assistance. Tonight, on behalf of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, I thank you for honoring us with the Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Award.

How did this exhibit happen? It is a long time since the startled producer Bob Weis answered his phone in Orlando, Florida, when he listened to a woman who said,

From left to right: Geoff Boisi, chair of the Leadership Roundtable; Sr. Annmarie Sanders and Sr. Helen Garvey representing Women & Spirit; and Kerry Robinson, executive director of the Leadership Roundtable.

“I am a Catholic sister and I would like to have an exhibit about Catholic sisters in the Smithsonian.” “Well,” thought Bob, “who is putting me on?” He had never met a Catholic sister. He knew nothing about Catholic sisters. So, lesson one: best practices begin with a vision and an active imagination. It goes to new, uncharted places with a certain amateur naivety, but a clear, professional goal. The purposes of this exhibit were, one, to document the significant leadership role of Catholic sisters in social change in building the social fabric of the country through education, health care, and social services. And, secondly, to tell what we perceived was the untold story of the leadership of Catholic sisters in developing and sustaining institutions of culture in the United States and broadening access to them. Before calling Bob Weis, several sisters had visited the Smithsonian Institution with the idea that the museum might like to design the exhibit and take over its course. The curators, who are

“

So, lesson one: best practices begin with a vision and an active imagination. It goes to new, uncharted places with a certain amateur naivety, but a clear, professional goal.”

well encountered with visionaries, treated us with politeness, and disabused us of any notion that the Smithsonian would fulfill our wishes, but held out one lifeline: you should have a charette. A charette is a retreat, or a planning session, involving interdisciplinary participants, and it results in an outline or a theme of the project that’s being developed.

Lesson two: be prepared to learn. After being advised to organize a charette, the

LCWR committee had no funds for a charette or anything else. So next lesson: development begins with me. We had to lift the receiver, dial the number, make the appointment, go to the meeting, and ask for the money. Later, two Sisters of St. Joseph helped us to raise the funds. For the charette, two sisters actually gave $15,000 each of their own personal patrimony, because we had no other funds to run the charette. The charette took place at the Maritime Institute near Baltimore, Maryland, on October 29th, 2005. A critical feature of the charette was that we invited Katherine Ott, a Smithsonian curator, to the event. A Quaker, Katherine identified immediately with the social justice commitment of Catholic sisters and quickly became an advocate for the exhibit. At the close of the charette, the members of the LCWR History Committee were discouraged. They had just experienced a creative three-day workshop demonstrating the possibilities of an exhibit about Catholic sisters. They should have been excited. Why were they disheartened? They expressed concerns about finances; they had almost no money; they voiced apprehension about design, none of them had talent in that area; they conveyed anxiety about artifacts. How do you obtain them, store them, and keep congregational archivists happy about them?

In the midst of this sea of collective depression, a lay participant spoke: “Why are you afraid of a little charette? Why are you afraid of a little exhibit when your foremothers, with little or no money, crossed the ocean, navigated rivers, learned a new language, nursed in the Civil War, raised monies, and built schools and hospitals? Why are you afraid of a little exhibit?” Remembering the legacy of our foremothers, the LCWR History Committee pulled up its socks and renewed its mission to mount an exhibit. Lesson three: the vision reveals itself in discouragement, fatigue, and occasional

whining. Expect challenges, share fears, support one another. It’s what we do with these occasional bumps that make the difference. To forward the design of the charette, the committee had to raise funds, engage a design firm, obtain artifacts, and secure venues. The committee had to execute. What helped significantly was that the committee represented different congregations with diverse abilities, including a historian, a communicator, a sociologist, a theologian, an artist, and educators. What helped us immensely was the inspiring stories of the women religious themselves which touched our hearts and compelled our devotion. Listen to the words Mother Mary John Hughes, circa 1880. Mother Hughes, a Presentation Sister of Aberdeen, South Dakota, sends this advertisement to potential members of her community: “We offer you no salary, no recompense, no holidays, no pensions, but much hard work, a poor dwelling, few consolations, many disappointments, frequent sickness, a violent or lonely death.”

Even with these landmark stories, there was no way that the LCWR could achieve its goals by relying only on its own knowledge and culture. The project would never have succeeded without the professional excellence, personal devotion, and collaborative spirit of the professional firms of Design Island and Seruto & Company. Besides that, the large-hearted generosity of the donors and the absolute cooperation of women religious throughout the country made this effort a success. In the process, strangers became friends, colleagues became advocates, and old friends became benefactors. Most important lesson of all: relationships, relationships, relationships.

Thank you so very much for the Leadership Roundtable Best Practices Award and this recognition of Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America. Thank you.

The

National Leadership

Roundtable on Church Management MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

PARTNERSHIP: AN INEVITABILITY

Carolyn Woo

President and CEO, Catholic Relief Services

Opening Prayer

Trish Sullivan Vanni Publisher Liturgical Press

Loving God, on this day, the memorial of Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, his words ring in our hearts: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” We ask you to send your Spirit upon our time together, that we, like the great saint, can meet the challenges facing your Church and call her to unity. In the hours ahead, let our conversation for innovation and collaboration be fully alive. Let our vision for your

mission be fully alive. Let our passion for our faith and joy and justice unending be fully alive, that your Church and the fullness of your reign which it serves might be in us fully alive. And we boldly ask this in the name of our brother and Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Carolyn Woo President and CEO Catholic

Relief Services

Without partnerships, there would be no CRS. The CRS model of getting work done is really through partnerships, and I will tell a bit more of that story as we go along.

In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict writes, “Individuals who care for others must first be professionally competent.” While professional competence is a primary, fundamental requirement, it is not sufficient. Human beings always need something more, and that something more is love.

If we are to do the work of God, we need to remember two things: one is that professional competence is very important; the second is that the work of serving God also

needs to be marked with a sense of joy, and a sense of compassion and love for the people we serve and the people we work with. At certain points there are so many needs and so many people leaning on you for various things that it’s hard to remember that our work, every day, doesn’t just depend on us, but on the Holy Spirit. I think that’s where the joy comes in. This is a work with God, a co-creation with God.

I love another quote from Pope Benedict: “Helping partner organizations respond to poverty and injustice is a grace.” Working with other people is difficult; working across organizations is difficult. It is not

Carolyn Woo

Trish Vanni

simple or easy working with many different people from many different cultures in different contexts and with different aspirations. That’s why I use that quote, as a reminder that there is a lot of grace when we interact with each other to make each other better.

“Without partnerships, there is no CRS”

Catholic Relief Services’ fundamental identity as part of the Catholic Church implies that our national Church partners are so much more than partners. They are our sister agencies in one human family. When we work overseas, our preferred partners are Catholic institutions. And they may be religious orders who have health care, and orphanages, and schools in these countries. It could be the diocesan arm. It could be the Episcopal conference of that particular country. It could be the Caritas agency of that particular country. But about 50 percent of our partners are Catholic institutions. We don’t think of them as just organizations with whom we make transactions. Rather, it’s like gaining in-laws into your life.

And so we think of our Catholic partners as part of the same family, and the work that we do is really to enhance the universal Church, wherever they operate. Sometimes they operate in really difficult situations. We think about them as brother and sister agencies in the same family with the same mission of taking the Gospel into action.

Partnership is fundamental to how CRS sees itself in the world. Our belief that solidarity will transform the world implies a commitment to right relationships. So because of the work that we’re trying to do, how we treat our partners, how we engage them, how we resolve difficulties,

how we set terms, how we negotiate, is all very important. If we don’t have the right relationships with our partners, then our work will be hollow. We are committed to transforming the world through our action, and that action is fortified by solidarity with these different units within the Church.

One of the things I say a lot at CRS to my internal staff and to our external people is that, with all of the issues and challenges that the Church is facing, we need to connect the dots. We can no longer afford the luxury of operating as independent

remaining spread over 100 countries; we’re talking about 40-some people in each country. That’s tiny, because the population we serve is 100 to 130 million. So how are we able to keep our own overhead and our staff costs and so on at an affordable level? It’s because we use partnerships. Why is CRS so effective when there is an emergency? It’s because there is an established network of the global Church in action. We don’t have to go in and restart a new operation, except in places like Banda Aceh or some parts of Afghanistan which don’t have a Church presence. But most of the places that we

“ is is the definition of partnership: it’s about relationships, it’s about mutual commitment, it’s about common values, and it’s about shared goals.”

agents. Each agency and institution wants autonomy, we want things to be done our way, and we operate as these independent entities. But there’s just not enough funding to grow each dot. It’s just not going to happen anymore. So the ingenuity is not to create more dots still or increase funding for individual dots. The ingenuity, I think, for the Catholic Church, is how we connect the dots. How we connect them will allow us to have synergy in different ways. Solidarity is very important in connecting the dots. It’s where the future of our strength lies, not in starting a lot more new dots and not just in operating independently.

When we say CRS is nothing but partnerships, take a look at the numbers. We operate in about 100 countries. Our total staff is about 5,000. Four hundred of us are in headquarters. So think about the

work in, all the countries in Africa, have local Catholic networks. For those of you who are in business, this is your retail network. Now, just because it is present there doesn’t mean it is good, but it is there, and how we develop those partners becomes very important.

So, I want you to think about this organization which only has, on average, 40 people per country, leveraged by partners. In our reports, we have about 1,250 partners. So think about a network of 1,250 partners. Their work is incorporated in our work, and when our work is audited, our partners’ work is audited, too. So you have to think about all of these auditing standards and how, when we partner in such diverse and difficult and different levels of development of partnerships, we bear their risk in the work that we do as we incorporate them into it.

The global Church also consists of this organization, Caritas Internationalis, an association of all 164 Caritas networks in the world. So when I talk about the ability to connect the dots, think about if we were really able to create not just a loose membership association, but if we could connect in a different way, think how effective this could be.

So this is, first of all, the whole idea of how we depend on partnerships. I think many people know that of every dollar we spend, 94 cents go into the programming and to serving people. And where does it go, those 94 cents? It goes to our partners, because they are the implementation agencies. And because of that a couple of things happen. First, we are building the capability of our partners. We are providing them with funding, collaboration, and administrative training - and they do the work. The second thing is that a lot of times people ask whether there is a lot of corruption in these countries, and how we ensure that money doesn’t disappear, and so on and so forth. This is the benefit of having a Church network. It doesn’t mean that there are no Church personnel within some of these agencies who engage in petty crime; that happens. And we have very tight procedures around that. But it allows us to bypass working with local agencies that we don’t know very much about and that lack accountability. Additionally, all the local Church agencies have reporting structures to their dioceses, to the episcopal conference, and then to the Vatican. So, these are not loose agents operating on their own.

This is the definition of partnership: it’s about relationships, it’s about mutual commitment, it’s about common values, and it’s about shared goals. As we work with these partners it’s not just being able

to count 1,200 partners. We have to think about the dynamics behind working with each of those partners on a day-to-day basis, how we choose to interact with each other, how we solve problems, how we have joint goals, and so on.

Core Principles, Shared Vision, and Equity

Our organization is 68 years old and is spread around the world. Every so often we have to pull ourselves together and remember the principles on which we establish partnerships. The first is a shared vision. It is very important to listen to our partners, to have a sense of where they want to take their agencies. We don’t always connect on everything, but we connect on something. The reason is that a lot of times we receive funding on particular grants, and we have particular deliverables on those grants, and we do not have full autonomy and flexibility to accommodate our partners. Rather, we need to know where the common ground may be and how to engage our partners before we actually write the grants for a project. This is the principle of subsidiarity. We need to leave decisions in the hands of the people who are closest to our beneficiaries. They know better than we do.

“ is is the principle of subsidiarity. We need to leave decisions in the hands of the people who are closest to our beneficiaries. ey know better than we do.”

Another principle is that of equity. Equity is very important, because many times we are the agency with the money. We write the grant and get the funding. So it would be easy to view our partner simply as a contractor. But we must remove that mindset, and humbly say, “You are our equal partners on this project regardless of the size of your agency.” Respect for differences can at times be frustrating. For example, in different cultures people don’t respond to emails, they don’t respond to queries for anything. Their computers may go down for three weeks and you are left wondering what happened. There are different sorts of protocols and different standards for how you think about work being done. So it’s very important to understand and have respect for different styles and operating environments, and at the same time to also have accountability and deliverables.

Strengthening Partner Capacities

We are now working a lot on capacity strengthening, and that is making our partners stronger. Capacity strengthening for us is really three bodies of work. The first one is capacity building. It’s around helping people learn and become better as teams and as people. This can be new knowledge, new skills, or new attitudes. The second piece of it is actually working on the institution itself. You can teach people the best cost accounting practice, but it is useless if they go back to an environment where people don’t keep data, where the computers don’t work, where receipts are not kept, and so on. So you have to work on the institutional operating environment to make sure that skills can really be used. Finally, the third piece is mentoring, or as we call it, accompaniment. For example, we’re working in Haiti on a major health project. We invite a lot

of the Haitian officials to the US to work with the Catholic Health Association. This is more than just providing online tools or tool kits; this is a human dimension, a mentoring dimension.

Why is partnership strengthening important? The first reason is that most funding agencies (e.g., USAID and major foundations) now want to have at least 30 percent of their funding go directly to local institutions. So instead of working through these international NGOs, they want it to go to the local civil society and the local government.

The second reason is that if funding is going local, we want our partners to be competitive. We don’t want them to be unable to get at that money except through us, because less is going to come through us and more is going to go to them directly. So if we are to be responsible for the advancement of the universal Church on this particular dimension, then CRS must prepare our partners to compete successfully.

The third reason is that partners in places such as Africa desire to be the lead on projects instead of being our secondary subcontractors. There are more people who have more education and higher levels of capabilities. For example, even in Haiti, 95 percent of our staff is composed of professionals, with college degrees and master’s degrees. So why shouldn’t they be the leaders? I’ve seen China develop. It is no longer happy just to follow. They are taking the lead, and that’s the natural development. Six of the 10 highest growth countries are in Africa. It is emerging and it wants to feel itself in the world, so we recognize that.

The fourth reason is based on subsidiarity. If our partners are ready, then it’s time to

pass on the work. CRS has worked itself out of a job over and over and over again. For example, we started out in 1943 in Eastern Europe because that’s where the refugees were. We now only have one office in Eastern Europe, because they are prosperous and can take care of their own issues. We also once had a huge body of work in India. We’re shrinking that body of work because they are able to do it themselves. India rejects aid, and it’s the happy outcome. But the flipside is that we’re constantly working ourselves out of a job. As we pass on more of the operating projects, like running clinics, running food programs, running agriculture programs, what will we, ourselves, do? This is a challenging but interesting question.

Capacity Strengthening Examples: PEPFAR and Strength in Solidarity

From 2004 to about 2012, we were working on the PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] program started by President George W. Bush. We formed a consortium called AIDS Relief which was one of the largest recipients of AIDS funding. We were very effective, and a legacy of President Bush was that he saved millions of people through the PEPFAR program. We served about 750,000 people in 10 countries. With PEPFAR II, new funding has been authorized, but they want it to go to local agencies as much as possible. So out of the 10 countries we served, 8 countries are now the primary lead on these projects. We are now their technical support. In other words, we stand on the side. Out of 14 proposals submitted by our partners, 13 of them are funded. That is what success looks like. And this is the journey that we’re on in terms of partnership strengthening. Another example is with a project called

Strength in Solidarity. We received a major grant from a Catholic family foundation and the whole objective of that grant is to improve our capabilities to do capacity building. We will have a capacity-strengthening institute. We will be looking at what tools and skills we ourselves need in order to build up the capabilities of our partners. For example, what type of assessment instrument do we need? How do we engage partners in their own self-assessments? How do we help our partners develop goals in that process? How do we become accountable?

One of the things that we’re doing in Haiti is giving our beneficiaries mobile devices. We’re doing this for many different reasons. For one thing, you can deliver literacy lessons through mobile devices. You can also collect data, diagnose crops, and so on. But they can also tell us what type of job we’re doing. We have given them access to tell us when they think we have not paid them enough attention, when they feel like we said we would do this but we didn’t do this, or that they’re not happy with us for whatever reason. We’re building this whole infrastructure to do what we’ve already done but more on an ad hoc level and scale it across the many countries we work in.

What is the value proposition of an agency like Catholic Relief Services? As we become increasingly sophisticated, our job is no longer to run clinics and have the locals follow us around. They are running the clinics. They know how to run clinics. So the next step is to determine our value-added.

CONNECTING WITH TODAY’S FUNDERS: OBSERVATIONS FROM AN INVESTOR

Charles T. Harris Founder SeaChange Capital Partners

Charles Harris

Director, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation

Founder, SeaChange Capital Partners

I want to address two elements of the work I’ve been engaged in for the last 10 years. One is organizing funder collaboratives to put the resources behind the highest-performing non-profit organizations that they need in order to address the problems they’re facing somewhere near the scale of the problem. There’s no funder in the world, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that can do this work alone, and yet the impediments to doing it collaboratively are very, very substantial and often justified. However, I hope I can convince you.

Secondly, more recently, I have engaged in a lot of funding around collaboration and actual mergers of non-profits, and I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned there, as I gather it’s of some relevance to your work, and I think I have some good news on that front as well.

At the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we invest to improve the life trajectories of the most vulnerable children and youth in this country. In the US, nearly one in five children lives in poverty; that means six million children are in deep poverty. Thirty percent of public school students fail to graduate from high school; that number is more like 60 to 70 percent in many of our

low-income communities. Nearly one in four of the approximately 30,000 young people aging out of foster care each year become immediately homeless. So we think about our work very explicitly as investment as opposed to charity, per se. I think from Carolyn’s remarks, the notion of capacity building drives our work. If we can help these organizations to have the capacities in all these different dimensions, then they’ll do the work. We just need to give them those tools.

It’s difficult, but not impossible, to derive a rate of social return on investment for

one’s philanthropic giving. You need to have economically sophisticated cost-benefit analysis. It’s very helpful to have scientifically valid third party evaluation results to convince yourself that the intervention that you’re funding is actually having the impact that you hope for. But with those tools which are available to us from social science and our other work, you can do that.

Our work is advanced from a secular platform, but I think the spirit and the motivation for the work would be very similar, and perhaps exactly the same, as the work being done in the Church. The business analysis and the methodologies that I’m going to talk about are simply tools to drive to a change in the world that we’d all like to see. What I’ve found is that this kind of methodical, careful, detailed approach to investing in philanthropic resources not only guides our investments, but has allowed us to attract significant funding from other foundations and wealthy families in a very precise way. But it’s the foundational care with which we make our investment selections and

“ What I’ve found is that this kind of methodical, careful, detailed approach to investing in philanthropic resources not only guides our investments, but has allowed us to attract significant funding from other foundations and wealthy families in a very precise way.”

Chuck Harris

present those to other funders that gives them the confidence to join us to get some larger things done.

See if you agree with me that the private equity analogy holds here. I say to myself, if I were to close my eyes in my office every day and sort of forget what I was doing, it feels an awful lot like I’m working in a private equity firm. My background is relevant for this work. I went on from working at Goldman Sachs to follow my own philanthropy. I had the good fortune to be able to write some nice checks, but never had the luxury to get deeply involved with the organizations I was sponsoring. I had heard that was very cool, so I set off about 10 years ago to do that. That led me into a lot of non-profit board service, and I focused my work on educational opportunity and achievement gaps that young people in our low-income communities face. I’ve had the opportunity to serve on boards of trustees across the entire K-16 educational spectrum, ranging from elite education to inner city charter school work. And so I feel like I’ve seen a good spectrum there. In 2006, along with our former partner, Bob Steel, I co-founded SeaChange Capital Partners on the notion that if investment bankers could team up to funnel or channel billions of dollars to incredibly mundane businesses, why couldn’t we do the same in a situation where the power of the heart should motivate people to do a lot more than that, to try to bring some of those techniques to that work.

I moved more recently to the Edna McConnell Clark because Edna McConnell Clark, as it turns out, is one of the very few endowed foundations that fundraises actively alongside its own grants, and they were doing that at a scale about 10 times what I was getting done at SeaChange Capital. I have a long history in my life of

staying with things too long, but I saw an opportunity to move and get more done during whatever time I have left, and I would like to describe that to you.

The Theory of Charitable Investment

Let me spend a few minutes on what may be incredibly dull, but I think it’s at the heart of this: our theory of investment, and what we think works for us, and what we think attracts these other funders into our portfolio. We look at six categories of characteristics of the underlying non-profits that we are selecting to fund. First, do they have a compelling product? Second, what are their performance tracking and outcomes management? Third, broadly, what do we think of their leadership and management team? Fourth, their financial health. Fifth, their operating viability. And sixth, are they actually compatible with us? We could have all of the first five and not get along, but that’s not going to be very helpful.

For us, a compelling product revolves around the following. First, does the organization serve young people from low-income and high-risk circumstances? Do they live in communities of need: rural, urban, high unemployment, teen pregnancy, youth in foster care, juvenile justice systems, high school dropouts, disconnected youth, and concentrations of poverty. Those are the communities we want to see and work in. Does the organization recruit and screen participants explicitly in order to deal with the most disadvantaged? Many of the best performing non-profits, including lots that I have funded personally, do not do that. Is the organization driven to youth outcomes and objectives that are clearly articulated and measurable? Are the stakeholders around the organization aligned: the youth, the schools, the parents, the funders, the

boards, the policymakers? Is the underlying program model clear, consistent, and tailored to the achievement of the desired results? We are very insistent on seeing both a theory of change that’s well-articulated and research-validated evidence that connects the services with the desired outcomes. Is the program codified and managed for fidelity? Is the level of participation monitored and assured? Is the program’s cost in line with similar types of efforts, and does that cost level constitute a barrier to potential scaling of the work?

So if you have that, we think we’ve got a conversation to have with your organization. We would then turn to the way that your organization tracks performance and outcomes. What is your current level of evidence? We have a sort of three-way paradigm. We talk about apparent effectiveness, demonstrated effectiveness, and proven effectiveness. And you see those often correlated with the life stage of an organization. Obviously, the more time you’ve been at it, the more likely you are to have accumulated evidence, third-party evidence in particular, that your work is getting the job done. Is there quality control in the business? What are the operating plans? Does the organization track participation by unique identities and track the program enrollment? These are incredibly mundane and difficult things to do, but we think important to knowing that you’re doing what you think you’re doing. Do they track the dosage that they’re delivering of whatever their intervention is? And do they track the outcomes of all participants, not just the strongest ones?

Leadership and Management

Turning to leadership and management, we, of course, just try to do a qualitative, overall assessment of the team, particularly the CEO. Have they tried to grow in the past, and how has that gone?

“ Is there quality control in the business? What are the operating plans? Does the organization track participation by unique identities and track the program enrollment? ese are incredibly mundane and difficult things to do, but we think important to knowing that you’re doing what you think you’re doing.”

Are they engaged in influencing policies, specifically government policies, that may affect availability of funding and support for their work? Have they thought about succession planning? Have they outgrown complete dependence on their founder? Do they actively manage external relations? Do they have a sense of who their competitors or colleagues in the same work might be? How are their fundraising strengths? Do they retain their staff? What’s the relationship between the CEO and the board chair look like? And more generally, what is the level of board oversight? What’s the experience base that the board of directors bring, and how actively are they participating in the funding of the effort?

We would then turn to the financial health of the organization, and we could go on about this ad nauseum for sure, but first, do the organization’s finances look consistent with its stage of development? What are the revenue trends? What is the mix of revenues, and what is the outlook for those? Likewise on the expense side. Non-profits actually have to be profitable to grow and the cash flow characteristics of a non-profit can be quite favorable. So, do they have operating margins that drive net asset growth? What do their auditors think about how they’re working? Do they get their audits completed on time, and what do the management letters say about the internal control systems? Are they professional in the management of grants and the compliance with grants? We spend a lot of time with their finance

staff. What are their banking relationships? How do they report to their board, and how frequently on their finances? How carefully is that monitored, even down to the sort of frequency with which the finance committee of the board meets?

Moving on to operational viability. What are the organizational priorities? What are the skill sets of the various staff members? What’s the turnover look like at the staff level? What kind of span of control do they expect of their management? Do they have a talent development pipeline that is robustly managed? What do we think of their communications, public relations, and policy work? How about their IT systems? Usually you find, or we find, that the IT systems need some work, but is there an awareness of that and is it one of their priorities?

And then, finally, compatibility ends up being extremely important. Are they aligned with our theory of investment or are they open to the notion of third party evaluation, despite its expense and time consumption? Is there an organizational culture of openness? One of my pet peeves, being solicited for non-profit support, is the leader of a non-profit organization approaching me with a single aspirational vision of the future of that organization. The only thing you know for sure is that, whatever happens, it won’t be that. And of course in business we find the importance of just basic business planning around not a single case, but all the reasonable things that could go wrong,

and how we anticipate and plan for those. We find that when a management team approaches us having thought through those things and not defensively protective of a vision that just can’t be real, they have a lot more credibility with us. And often in our engagements with non-profits, the first thing we do is hire the Bridgespan group, or one of their counterparts in the non-profit consulting world, to come in and help the management team refine their business plan.

Non-profit accounting principles are not at all helpful, as you’ve probably discovered. In the business world, if you sell a share of stock, that dollar, if you sell it for a dollar, doesn’t flow through the income statement. Not so in non-profit accounting. Every dollar that comes in the door, I don’t care whether it’s capital or true revenue, counts as revenue. And I think that confuses management and it confuses donors as to what they’re funding. You can develop a set of books for your management and your board that are more aligned with the reality of what you’re doing.

So I hope that will give you an idea of the kind of analysis of a non-profit operating entity that gives us confidence to make $10-, $20-, $30-million multi-year, unrestricted, capacity-building, enterprise-level grants, and that has allowed us over the last four years to bring over $300 million from some of the other leading foundations and family philanthropist in the country into our portfolio on the basis of our analysis, due diligence, and management of the grants. We think there’s

“ Non-profits consistently struggle with issues of insufficient scale, leadership, succession, duplication of effort, limited funds, and very high fundraising costs. ere are all kinds of collaborative efforts that can address that, either out of necessity or sometimes on a proactive basis.”

great promise for this. We’re finding that with our co-investors who include the likes of foundations such as the Gates, Robert Wood Johnson, Gretsky, Kellogg and so on, that they’re learning the techniques. Some of them are experimenting with capital aggregation. We think it’s very helpful because we know the scale of the underlying problem of poverty, and the continuation of poverty down the line of a family is something that no single organization can conquer.

Nonprofit Mergers and Acquisitions

The US nonprofit sector has over one million organizations, 9 million paid employees, and represents an excess of 5% of GDP. The number of organizations the non-profit sector has doubled in the last 15 years; meanwhile, our population has grown by 17 percent and total giving has grown by 34 percent. That doesn’t add up very well. Nonprofits consistently struggle with issues of insufficient scale, leadership, succession, duplication of effort, limited funds, and very high fundraising costs. There are all kinds of collaborative efforts that can address that, either out of necessity or sometimes on a proactive basis. We see back office consolidations, program joint ventures, data sharing collaborations, simple alignment of mission and understanding of what I’m doing and what you’re doing so that we’re not stepping on each other’s toes in serving the same population. We think that these kinds of collaborations, including acquisitions and

mergers, can be very effective to address some of the challenges I’ve just mentioned and, if properly constructed, can bring on efficiency, effectiveness, and stability for the ongoing entities.

Exploring and implementing a collaboration of this kind requires a set of very clear, mission-focused thinking, and we find in dealing with organizations that think they want to do something together, spending the first few meetings around the vision and the mission is far and away the most productive thing to do. Hold the lawyers off for a few sessions if you possibly can, and see if you actually agree on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. It’s difficult and timeconsuming, but we find without that first step, these things often don’t go very far.

Implementing these collaborations, in particular the complete combination of two or more organizations, involves unavoidable one-time costs, including legal, accounting, public relations, consulting services, IT integration, severance pay, and real estate consolidation. Who wants to pay for all that? The most innovative thing we did at SeaChange Capital Partners was to form a funding partnership with the Lodestar Foundation, and what we do is pay for those items. If you come to us with a carefully constructed, or even not so carefully constructed collaboration project that we can help construct more carefully, and you can identify what those one-time costs are, we

will shoulder a sizeable proportion of them to bring the deal over the finish line. Often we find in the analysis that a sensible collaboration can create tangible programmatic and operational benefits that are many multiples of those one-time expenses in value. And you know, even when collaboration is not in the end pursued, the process often sharpens the thinking of the people involved fairly significantly. So I would also just say don’t be discouraged by the fear of failure. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about that. Clearly, there are risks in engaging in these conversations, but again, we’ve seen deals break up and two organizations walk away stronger.

The impediments we most often encounter to getting this kind of work done are a lack of mission orientation, a fear over reputation, some stigma around failure, previous

“ Often we find in the analysis that a sensible collaboration can create tangible programmatic and operational benefits that are many multiples of those onetime expenses in value. And you know, even when collaboration is not in the end pursued, the process often sharpens the thinking of the people involved fairly significantly.”

failed attempts to do the same thing in the same organization, failure to find funding for it in the past, perhaps a history of competition or lack of trust between potential partners, and just a lack of know-how and experience. Happily there’s a small but growing community of very focused consultants who can help you through this exercise. We don’t provide that service, but we do help pay for it.

Our partner at the Lodestar Foundation, Jerry Hirsch, has been funding this kind of activity out of his own bank account for 10 or 12 years now. Additionally, he donated a database that he developed of completed collaboration projects in the United States between nonprofits over the last 10 years. And I’ll just share some of the headlines of what that data tells us. Types of collaboration include about 50 percent of them involve joint programming, about 20 percent back-office consolidation of some kind or another, and 17 percent constituted mergers in this particular database. Regarding the geographic scope of the collaboration, about a third were city-specific, another third county-wide, about 25 percent regional, and about 12 percent national. So there was an emphasis on local work, which isn’t surprising. I certainly find that despite being a national grant maker, most philanthropy takes place on a local or community basis, and I think this data is consistent with that. People report efficiency being a motivator in 52 percent of the cases; about half think fundraising will be more effective as a combined organization; programmatic benefits; strengthening of the program, about 37 percent; and enhancement of the leadership of the effort about 37 percent.

Who initiates these transactions? In this particular database, the executive directors of the organizations in 60 percent of these cases initiated them. So they were not funder-driven, not board-driven, but

driven by the people doing the work on the ground. Actually, this data suggests that only in 9 percent of these cases was a funder behind the idea. We see this activity in all sectors of the non-profit area, but with a strong emphasis on human services.

So our advice to organizations is to be proactive; don’t wait for a crisis if you can avoid it. Keep the mission forefront in the conversations, watch your language, delay the lawyers, don’t forget the money, get help, don’t dawdle and celebrate. We do find often that people wait too long to enter into these conversations, and sources of funding for a

the Wellness Center, which provided her and her loved ones with significant psychosocial support through her last couple of years. She said to her husband, before she died, that New York City needed one of these things, so he developed something called Gilda’s Club in New York City. The two organizations were built on exactly the same operating model, and they even had an agreement to not operate in the same geographies. Fast forward 25 or 30 years, Gilda’s Club had taken on some debt that they could no longer service and that was going to be a big problem, so they approached the Wellness Community and negotiated a merger. The

“ We want to support leaders who are willing to make these difficult mission-driven decisions. We want to encourage innovation and best practices, and to put our skills coming out of the financial sector, to work here in a sector that is underserved in this regard.”

failing non-profit on the way down are very few and far between. Financial restructuring, per se, is very seldom an option. A loss of confidence in a non-profit organization can be terminal. There are very few inducements in the sector to significant risk taking. There’s no golden parachute or hand cuff or gold anything else available to anybody in any of these transactions. And there’s no reality checks, there’s no stock price, there’s no spread to see how that’s moving, no ratings to see the impact of. Nonetheless, as I say, we’re seeing a lot of this activity, much of it very, very constructive, and we’re delighted by that most of the time.

I want to give you one concrete example of a transaction that we helped fund at SeaChange Capital Partners to create an organization called the Cancer Support Community. When Gilda Radner was dying of cancer in L.A. she went to a place called

post-collaboration budget is $6 million; the one-time cost of putting this thing together added up to $424,000. $100,000 of that was to just pay off the debt, and get if off the table, and remove that impediment to the successful transaction. So, essentially, we saw about three-and-a-half times leverage to our grant to get this thing done, and the organizations are now still doing the same work nationwide with a fraction of the staff and with no duplication of overhead.

Why are we involved in this? We think it gives ourselves and our funders the potential for leverage giving and returns that are many times the resources expended. We want to support leaders who are willing to make these difficult mission-driven decisions. We want to encourage innovation and best practices, and to put our skills coming out of the financial sector, to work here in a sector that is underserved in this regard.

I’ll just finish by citing three different funding sources that have emerged in the past few years to help organizations get over some of the difficulties of putting these things together. The only national fund that I’m aware of is the SeaChange Lodestar fund. They have a website, they’re open for business. We’ve done about $850,000 of grant making in the last 18 months, and have the resources to do a lot more, so go to the website and bring them on. We more recently raised a little over $1 million for a New York City specific fund called NYMAC, the New York Merger, Acquisition, and Collaboration Fund. And then the Boston Foundation and the Non-Profit Finance Fund have collaborated to put together a fund in Boston to do the same work, called the Catalyst Fund. Our hope is that more of these regional funds will spring up. There are probably some we don’t know about. We see a great deal more interest and a great deal more awareness that this is actually possible, and that boards can be brought over the finish line.

Quite interestingly, another one of the transactions we got in the middle of was the merger of the United Nations Foundation, the organization that Ted Turner gave $1 billion or pledged a $1 billion to some years ago, and the United Nations Association, which is this chapter-based organization that runs model UN programs in high schools. They’ve been talking about merging for 12-15 years and had gotten into a sort of ego-driven standoff at both the staff and the board levels. Our former leader, John Whitehead, was on the board of one of these organizations as one of the staunchest opponents to this merger. We found that simply showing up as a funder - not as an advisor or proponent to either side of the deal - got them over those hurdles and they got the deal done. So it is possible.

SELECTED QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND INSIGHTS

James Donahue President Graduate Theological Union

Carolyn, at the early stages in your partnership relationships, you encountered religious and cultural differences that are profound and deeply embedded in the situations in which you work. Would the presumption that the need and the urgency to address the situations at hand are sufficient to enable you to overcome those types of deeply-grounded resistances, and how do you really think about those, particularly at the front end?

Carolyn Woo

So I would say we do three types of work: one is emergency, which everybody identifies us with and we’re very good at that, but that’s only one third of our work. Then the second part of the work is stabilization, restoring people to normal life. And the third stage is transformation, whether it is of education systems, or health systems, or agricultural enterprise market systems. When it’s an emergency, that’s not the time

when you find new partners. There have been situations, such as in Banda Aceh, where there’s no Catholic presence and there’s not a lot of civil society, and in that case, as the same old partners that show up, you know CRS was there first, and then there was Red Cross, and then there was the United Nations and so it’s a tight network of emergency relief networks. But emergencies are not the time where you go and hold hands and develop new relationships.

However, where it becomes important is really the beginning of rebuilding lives into communities. And the CRS model is highly integrative as we use integral human development model, which is not just to serve one need. The need is not shelter. The need is really to create neighborhoods that are thriving, that have livelihood, where the children get to go to school, and so on. Those types of things require a lot of partnership building. And again, because we have been in the field for 68 years, there are some standing relationships. When we build new relationships, religious differences are not the most difficult things to overcome. We operate on the Catholic social teachings, but they’re universal principles. And we happen to have experience working with non-Catholics and non-Christians around those principles.

It’s also very important that people trust us. It’s not because of religious similarities. I mean, these principles are universal. People ask if you really respect people’s differences on the ground. We work with the Blue Crescent, and the Red Crescent, and so on. We work with Hindu groups, we work Buddhist groups, and so on. That really is not so much the difficulty. The biggest difficulty in partnerships for us is cultural differences. That’s really where it is, and you know, we are Americans rather

James Donahue

than we’re Catholics and Americans carry a lot of baggage.

Patrick Carolan

Executive Director Franciscan Action Network

My organization has a budget of $270,000, so if we’re seeking foundation money and I’m competing that employ a staff of professional grant writers, I’m not going to win. We want to be a small organization; we think that makes us very effective in carrying out our mission. But at the same time, we need to get grant money and foundation money to go forward. What are your thoughts on smaller organizations competing for grant money?

Chuck Harris

The vast majority of individual and family philanthropists are focused on much smaller community-based projects. The idea of joining a national effort feels for most funders like dilution of effort as opposed to concentration of effort.

Carolyn Woo

The types of projects you have in mind are probably very local. And so you have natural constituents and stakeholders who will value that body of work. And you could probably run into them and see them eyeball-to-eyeball. So the first thing is to understand who are your natural stakeholders and constituents.

over again, so there is a question of what would you do beyond just fundraising? What are your other partners in the community doing? You would want to have conversations about hooking up so that you are more powerful than working on your own. Many Catholic Charities agencies have actually opened up a lot more conversations with their peer agencies in the communities and have said that for the good of our clientele and our beneficiaries, we can no longer do this on our own.

Betty

Ann Donnelly Trustee

Mary J. Donnelly Foundation

We need to work on the legislative piece so that there’s proper funding for effective programs, both domestically and internationally. I’d be intrigued to hear both of you talk about any knowledge you might have about collaborations and partnerships that CRS and your organization do for those organizations who are interested in making that link between direct service and the policy piece.

Chuck Harris

If there is need related to sustainability, that service will be needed over and

I’m going to address that by saying we are organizing, in mid-July, a get-together of all our co-investors in our latest fund. We’ve surveyed our grantees as to what policies in what jurisdictions they’re attempting to affect that would be beneficial to them. We’re mapping that. We’re going to bring it to our co-investors, who are nationally distributed around the country, and figure

out what we, as a group, can do that no one of us could do to help move those policies. We’ve got people from Tulsa, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, Georgia, and other places. We also fund advice in many areas, including hiring lobbyists or other firms who advise and work with our grantees. We’re hearing from our grantees increasingly that the state level, and state legislatures, is the most effective and productive places to spend time. There seems to be a devolving of the distribution of federal resources at the state level, and so that’s where our grantees are telling us they need help.

Carolyn Woo

We actually have a unit that does advocacy. We make sure that we talk to our representatives and senators, particularly on povertyfocused assistance. We talk across the board to both Republicans and Democrats. We also belong to a group called Interaction, an association of several hundred non-profits. It has an advocacy arm which we sign onto when it is appropriate for us. Being a Catholic agency, there are certain things that are not appropriate for us, but when it is appropriate we join in the power of the group voice. We also collaborate with the USCCB. There’s an ongoing initiative called Catholics Confront Global Poverty (CCGP) which is delivered by email every week. It has items and advocacy action items. It suggests when to write to your senator and gives the language and easy access to knowing your representative’s email, etc.

And finally, in collaboration with the USCCB, we send 300 people to Capitol Hill. They are organized according to various representatives, given talking points, and so on. We are doing the same thing with our university programs, working with students and providing a training program on how to advocate, and then take them to Washington D.C. and send them to the

Betty Ann Donnelly

Patrick Carolan

various hallways of the Russell Building to learn how to engage their representatives on these policy issues.

Kevin FitzGerald Student of Canon Law

Are you attracting young, recent graduates to be your employees and to promote your work?

Carolyn Woo

My answer would be not enough. I mean, there’s the usual recruitment every year. We have new global fellows, about a class of 40-some, and they are about 26 or 27 years old. They generally have gone through a master’s program, know multiple languages, have about two years or three years with the Peace Corps, or Jesuit Volunteer Corps, etc. They move into our system to become young country representatives after about two years with us. One of the things I miss most from working on a campus is not just young people, but the lack of boundaries of how young people fill you with ideas and attitudes. They don’t take no for an answer and they have no questions no problem telling you, “Oh, that is so yesterday.” And we don’t have enough of that.

Brian Reynolds Chancellor Archdiocese of Louisville

It appears that in the area of collaboration, there’s an increasing intolerance for difference of opinion. Can you comment on collaboration in places where there is disagreement and intolerance?

Carolyn Woo

We collaborate with nearly 1,250 partners. That is a big tent. And with each of those partners, there are things that we agree with and there are things that we don’t agree with. And as a Catholic agency, we do not do anything related to contraceptives. We’re very clear about that. We do not provide funding, we do not engage in any activity where those things are involved.

Our approach in dealing with this is to ask whether there is a common ground or purpose. For example, is there a set of approaches that we’re both very comfortable with? Are there activities that we refrain from participating in regardless of who the partners is? If, like in the case of Planned Parenthood, one of its core purposes is modern family planning, that is another issue. Do we, however, walk away from the Gates Foundation which funds a lot of many different things? We take a lot of money from the US government and there are lots of things we don’t agree with the US government about, starting with some of the military investments. Should we stop taking that money?

But that has not been the Catholic Church approach. We feel that the US government needs to be responsible in addressing social needs. So do we therefore reject it because they have funding in various areas that we don’t approve of?

When we collaborate with a partner, it does not mean that we endorse all of their philosophies. We make that clear, because sometimes people will say that just the fact that you collaborate with someone could be scandalous. There are hundreds, probably close to a 1,000 members of a health association we belong to. It includes corporations, NGOs, researchers, universities, and so on, many of whom are engaging in things that we don’t subscribe to. But we learn a lot about health practices, such as how to treat HIV/AIDS, the latest evidence, and so on. If we cut ourselves off from those types of associations, we would lose the ability to serve well. We’re very thoughtful when we sign onto something. The smallest hint of anything inappropriate, we’ll withdraw from it. We make that decision based on our understanding what the Church stands for.

Geoffrey Boisi

Chair, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management Chair and CEO, Roundtable Investment Partners, LLC

Is there much interaction between Chuck Harris’s group and the Catholic community, and if not, how can we do more? How do we best access the kind of creative capital that you all represent and get some access to it?

Chuck Harris

On our website we now make it very clear that we collaborate with a lot of partners, but we do not do anything or fund anything which is against Church teaching.

There’s no explicit collaboration that I’m aware of with the Catholic Church. I say, come see us and make the case. As you know, I personally have been somewhat involved in education and care deeply about it, so I would be a good liaison for that conversation. I think as long as the kids we’re serving are the same kids that you want to serve, then we’ve got a lot to talk about.

Brian Reynolds

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

THE ERA OF ASSUMED VIRTUE IS OVER: THE NEW NORMAL

Robert Ottenhoff

President and CEO, GuideStar

Thank you so much for inviting me here today. Let me just start off by saying how much I admire your work and what an honor it is to be able to talk with all of you today. And I wish you well in the important work that you’re doing for our society. I’m going to talk to you today about the nonprofit world. I’ve never run a faith-based organization, so you’re all the experts on that, but I’m hoping that my sharing of information about the nonprofit sector can be of benefit to you and that you can apply it to your own situation.

“ e era of assuming virtue is over for nonprofit organizations.”

The GuideStar Mission and Vision

GuideStar’s mission is to revolutionize philanthropy with information. We believe that with more information, donors can make better and more confident decisions, and thereby increase their charitable giving. And also, armed with better information,

nonprofit organizations can increase their performance, both their efficiency and their effectiveness, and thereby increase their impact. So we have about 10 million users this year that will come to the GuideStar site, and we collect information from a variety of sources. First, we take every filing that the nonprofit organizations must file with the IRS. IRS Form 990s are the most obvious example, but there are other ones, as well. Increasingly, we’re finding that the 990 is an okay document, but donors are asking for more. And so we now have something called The GuideStar Exchange, which is a way for a nonprofit to supply us with information. We’ll talk some more about why donors want this, but this is a free way for a nonprofit to provide us with information about their board, about their management team, about their capabilities, about their mission, about their impact. And we have

about 50,000 organizations that have voluntarily given us this information, including 5,000 to 7,000 faith-based organizations.

We also collect information from our partners, like community foundations and private foundations that do their own

Bob Ottenhoff

“ We wouldn’t think about buying a car or a refrigerator without first referring to Consumer Reports, or using Zagat before we go to a restaurant. So that same kind of need for data is also driving a lot of the decisions today in the nonprofit sector and in how we make our giving decisions.”

vetting of nonprofits. Increasingly, we’re experimenting with things like user-end evaluations. So, for example, we work with a San Francisco-based organization that is now asking for the feedback of donors and program recipients and volunteers to various organizations. To give us one more data point, we acquired another organization called Philanthropedia last year, which collects information from program officers at foundations and content experts to give us feedback on the performance of organizations. And, finally, we’re starting to work with other organizations that provide accounting seals. So all that gets mixed into our database and then is made available to our users. As I mentioned, we have about 10 million users. We also supply data to about 75 other sites. So if you go to a commercial donor advice fund, they’re most likely using GuideStar data. If you go to some of the giving portals, like Network for Good and Just Give, they’re using GuideStar data. We’re trying to become the underlying data source to the nonprofit sector. We’ve built a model of sustainability. People use us in two ways: about 98 percent of our users use us at no charge and about 2 percent of our users dig really deep into the data or use some of our sophisticated tools. These users pay a fee and that’s now generating most of our operating revenue.

So I’m going to talk about three big issues today that I think are confronting the nonprofit sector: legitimacy and trust, effectiveness and efficiency, and the economics of where we are and where we think we’re going in the nonprofit sector.

Ensuring Legitimacy and Trust

The era of assuming virtue is over for nonprofit organizations. Now I say this to non-faith-based organizations as well. So I’m not just picking on you today. And I’m not saying you’re necessarily doing something wrong, but we live in an era today where we’ve got increased skepticism about nonprofit organizations and increased skepticism about institutions in general. So there are three big parts to this new era we’re in. It’s greater demand for transparency and accountability. Think about it. We’re now asking our schools to prove that our teachers are actually teaching our kids, right? We want to know more about how our government spends our money. So there’s a big movement afoot for more transparency around money. We’re asking our religious institutions to be more transparent, more accountable. We’re in an era now where people expect more from our institutions and they’re more skeptical of all of our institutions. Along with that is a greater personal engagement in philanthropy. We hear from so many donors who come to us and say, “I’m not going to give you money anymore simply because you’re nice people doing nice work. I’m looking for someone who can really make a difference and so I’m going to give my money to organizations that can show to me that they’re actually making a difference.”

Now this personal engagement has some downsides to it as well. We’re seeing increased emphasis on restricted gifts. We’re seeing more interest in organizations that

can be very tangible in describing what you get. Think about the growth of organizations like Kiva or Heifer International, where you see someone say, “For my $50.00 I’m going to buy a cow for this woman in Africa.” And I think that’s part of this movement we’re seeing about more engagement. People want to be involved, they want to do the research, but they want to know, do they have a good partner for their donor dollars? And finally, greater data on which to base decisions. And this shouldn’t be surprising. I know there are many business people in the room here today. You use data all the time. You wouldn’t think about making a major decision without having the data to back up your decision. We wouldn’t think about buying a car or a refrigerator without first referring to Consumer Reports, or using Zagat before we go to a restaurant. So that same kind of need for data is also driving a lot of the decisions today in the nonprofit sector and in how we make our giving decisions.

Along with this new era of assumed virtue being over is the incredible growth of the

“ Part of what you need to be able to explain to your donors is why you are unique and distinctive and why you are deserving of support. ”

nonprofit sector and how confusing that is to the average donor. This also should remind you that your favorite nonprofit organization is not the center of the universe. There are other choices donors have today. We’ve seen an amazing growth in the nonprofit sector. It’s growing at about 60,000 new nonprofits a year. Even during the great recession, starting in 2008, we’ve seen very little slowdown in the number of new nonprofits. I’m often asked, “do we have too many nonprofits?” And my answer always is, well, who’s to say? We don’t want a bureaucrat or some other czar to be telling us, “No, you can’t.” In a way, it does reflect the can-do attitude of Americans and the passion that we have both for making a difference in our society and the passion for getting things done. But I think it not only confuses the general public, it puts more pressure on donors to make sure that they’re supporting organizations that are worthy of support.

I’ll say one thing about that big drop in the number of active nonprofits we saw in 2011. No, these aren’t necessarily organizations that went out of business. The IRS got a lot of pressure from Congress to try to begin to oversee, I won’t say regulate, the nonprofit sector. It really had no idea about how many nonprofits there were, because it’s so easy to start one. So they sent out a postcard registration. If an organization got three postcards and didn’t answer, it lost its charitable status. So that lost about 300,000 organizations. But this is confusing. We did a webinar not too long ago for producers and editors of ESPN. They said so many of their stories now involve nonprofits. The NFL is a nonprofit; college bowls are nonprofits; celebrity athletes are creating nonprofits. What’s all this about? So I’ll leave it with the thought that your nonprofits, the ones you care about the most, are working in an environment

where there’s a lot of competition and there’s a lot of confusion. Part of what you need to be able to explain to your donors is why you are unique and distinctive and why you are deserving of support.

The “New Normal”

The second point I want to talk a little bit about is the “new normal”. And as businesspeople you know this story better than I do. But first let’s take a look at the sources of revenue. And this is all a surprise for many people. Private contributions, as important as they are, are only 14 percent of all the money going to support nonprofit organizations. So much of it comes through government grants, fees for services, and then fees for goods.

a report saying that foundation giving in 2011 was also pretty flat. So think about the numbers here. We’ve lost roughly $30 billion in the charitable sector since 2007. If we grow at 2 percent a year, as we did from 2009 to 2010, it would take us somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight years to get back to where we were in 2007.

So this is part of this “new normal” we have to begin to think about in the charitable sector. We’ve been doing surveys to find out what’s happening out there in the field. Our last survey was about six months or so ago. We saw that 41 percent of charitable organizations saw an increase in 2011. However, 65 percent saw an increase in demand.

“ So what is your organization aiming to accomplish? What are your strategies for making this happen? How are you going to do what you said you were going to do? Capabilities are of huge interest today to donors. And then, finally, how do you know that you’re making progress? How are you measuring your progress, so that I know my money is being well spent?”

Earned revenue is a big part of the sector, and fees for services are important. But if we focus for just a minute on philanthropic giving, we’ve got an amazing 40-year story. Year after year we saw steady increases in charitable giving without exception, until we got to 2008, where we saw for the first time a drop. This gives a little more granularity to that. We hit a peak for the sector of about $315 billion in 2007, saw a drop in 2008, a further drop in 2009. We saw a 2 percent increase in 2010. Just last week, Giving USA came out with its statistics for 2011. And we were basically flat for 2011. The Foundation Center just came out with

I want to focus your attention on another finding: 8 percent of all charities represented in the survey are in danger of closing. And, by the way, this is something we’ve been seeing now for the last few years, certainly since 2009, that continuously comes up. And some of the things we look for are contributions, low cash reserves, limited number of funders, and flat or declining non-contribution revenues. There are three big indicators we always look for as predictors of charitable giving. First, the stock market, particularly at the end of the year when it comes capital gains time is really impor-

tant. Many nonprofits get upwards of 40 percent or more of all of their giving in the last few weeks of December. Second, the unemployment rate. Makes sense, right? If you’re unemployed, you’re going to be giving less to charitable causes. And third, a mysterious but really important factor: consumer confidence. How do you feel about yourself, about your community, and about your prospects for the future? And I’ve added a fourth in the last year or so: the sorry condition of state and local and federal government budgets. There is uncertainty, so there are reductions. There are so many governments that are now reducing contracts, not paying contracts, or paying slowly. This has had a huge impact, particularly in social service organizations. So I think we need to be thinking about this “new normal” as part of our thoughts about the nonprofit sector.

And then, finally, I want to talk some more about this emphasis now on effectiveness and impact. Our own view about this is that people come with a variety of values and expectations. They want to choose their own criteria. And they are increas -

“

ingly interested in nonprofit capabilities and results. We’ve been doing a lot of research about what kind of data donors want before they make a decision. And this past year we interviewed about 5,000 high net worth individuals, about 1,000 or 2,000 advisers, and then, also, several thousand program officers at large foundations. Across the board, five things were seen to be the most important of all. First is financials, which is not surprising. But, more than that, effectiveness and legitimacy, basically this whole issue I was talking about earlier about whether they trust that you are a nonprofit and a good one. Then something about the cause and, finally, some basic information. These are the five essentials that your website needs to have, and they are the essentials that your annual reports need to have if you’re going to develop that trust from your donors.

As a result, we’ve now reorganized our reports to donors and the way we display information. We have something called our “public report page”. We’ve added some information that shows that, yes, this is a legitimate organization, yes it’s been authorized by the IRS to operate. And then along with that, we’ve begun to really emphasize mission. What’s the mission of this organization? What’s its impact statement? Is it measuring what it does? I’m personally on a mission to end the overhead ratio as the first question that’s asked about a nonprofit organization. I think the overhead ratio is terribly misleading and has been really harmful to a lot of nonprofit organizations. Yes, efficiency is important. Yes, how you allocate your resources are important, but what I want to know, first of all, is the mission of your organization and how you are doing?

What’s your impact? What difference are you making in your community? If you cost a little bit more than another organization but you’re doing so much more good, that’s really what matters to me.

And, so, as part of that effort, we’ve joined up with the Better Business Bureau and the independent sector to start something called Charting the Impact. And we’re on a movement to try to make these the key questions that a donor asks of a nonprofit organization. They’re simple but they’re really profound, and we would urge you to use this with your management team, spend some time in a board meeting asking these five questions, and then maybe begin to share them with your stakeholders. So you can ask your stakeholders, “Hey, here’s what we said about our organization. Do you agree? Do you agree that we’re really making a difference?” So what is your organization aiming to accomplish? What are your strategies for making this happen? How are you going to do what you said you were going to do? Capabilities are of huge interest today to donors. And then, finally, how do you know that you’re making progress? How are you measuring your progress, so that I know my money is being well spent?

We’re at an exciting moment for the nonprofit sector. It may not sound that way from what I’ve said so far. We know that demand for services is likely to increase. We know that revenues are not likely to come back to where they were in the 2007 level for some period of time. And so this gives us an opportunity, I think, to begin to think about how we can provide our services in new and exciting ways.

How can we do our work in different ways and continue to provide great service to our donors and increase our charitable giving?”

Bob Ottenhoff

I really started to think about this this past summer. My son, who just graduated last week was interning this past summer at eBay in San Jose. He called me and said, “What do you think about driving back with me from California?” My first thought was, oh, that’s a terrible idea; I can’t even stand the five-hour plane ride out to San Francisco. But, you know, this may not happen again that my son invites me to do this, and we both have a love of geography and history and food. So we took this five-day trek across the United States. Along the way I read four newspapers every day, but I never touched an actual newspaper; I read books but never touched a physical book; we listened to music constantly but we never turned on the radio. We used sources like Trip Adviser and Yelp to pick the best steak in Oklahoma City and the best breakfast burrito in Albuquerque. All along we were using industries that had changed, that over the last 10 years had been disintegrated by new technologies, by new ways of delivering services. When I got back I thought, you know, this is something that hasn’t happened yet in the nonprofit sector. Our time is still coming. We have not yet embraced the new technologies or embraced new ways of doing services. So many of our organizations are based today on business models that were created in the 1950s and the 1960s, when we expected the revenue to go up and up, and we expected our donors to be totally loyal to us, and we expected our organization to be the center of the universe. Those things don’t happen anymore. And so I think we’ve got an opportunity here to begin thinking about how we want to restructure our organizations, how we want to change the way we deliver services, how our business models need to change.

And so, I’ll leave you with that thought. How can we do our work in different ways and continue to provide great service to our donors and increase our charitable giving?

SELECTED QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND INSIGHTS

QUESTION

Churches don’t have to file IRS Form 990. Is this a good idea or a bad policy?

Bob Ottenhoff

It’s a bad idea, because in today’s world, for the reasons I stated, donors are expecting you to be transparent and accountable, and they want to know how you’re spending their hard-earned dollars. Many faith-based organizations are beginning to realize this, so there are many social service organizations that are now voluntarily starting to file on GuideStar. It’s a recognition of this is what it now takes to do business, to develop a strong relationship with the donating public.

QUESTION

I think many of us involved with nonprofit organizations struggle with the issues of how to support the institution long-term, because revenue’s obviously an important part of the equation. As I think about GuideStar’s model, what else are you doing to monetize the data that you’ve aggregated and the services that you hope to deliver so that you can grow further and offer, you know, a wider range of services to nonprofits and others?

Bob Ottenhoff

So we were started with about $25 million in foundation support from a consortium of foundations that came together, recognizing the need for data. And we’ve burned through that money pretty quickly. And the foundation said, “We’re not giving you any more money until you come up with a model of sustainability.” And so we had to go from free to fee. And we learned

through doing a lot of research that people were using us not only for individual donations, but for business purposes. And a lot of our users were accountants, lawyers, financial institutions who needed us in order to perform a service. So that’s when we came up with our model of charging for digging really deep into the data and using our sophisticated tools. And that’s now it’ll be somewhere between 90 to 100 percent of all of our revenues this year. It changed the culture of our organization. I believe that when everything’s free, good enough turns out to be good enough. And when a customer is required to give you some of their hardearned money and expecting something in return, it demanded that we think through our technology, think through the quality of our data, think through our customer service, do all kinds of things to be able to earn that fee.

“ So I think one of the trends you’re going to see, and we’re trying to be a part of this, is how do we drive more money to the high performers who are actually making a difference and have the ability to scale and to be sustainable.”

So it was really very good for us culturally. I believe that sustainability is going to be one of the key issues for the nonprofit sector in the years ahead. And I’ve become quite firm about this in my own beliefs. If we believe strongly in the mission of our organization, and we should, and we believe that the services we offer are important, are valuable, that they are really making a contribution to society, we have an obligation to be thinking through how can we sustain this service. And I don’t think it’s good enough today to say somehow we’ll muddle through. Somehow, we’ll figure it out and we’ll come up with enough money to save the day.

But it also leads to a more important issue now is the capabilities and capacities of organizations. Donors today want to know are you really making a difference? And that means we have an opportunity as donors to try to drive more money to highperforming organizations, because 1.6 million organizations spread out over the kind of revenue growth we’re going to see in the sector just isn’t going to work. If we’re not careful, we could end up sustaining mediocrity, rather than really making a difference. So I think one of the trends you’re going to see, and we’re trying to be a part of this, is how do we drive more money to the high performers who are actually making a difference and have the ability to scale and to be sustainable.

QUESTION

I was struck by your trip across the country and your recognition of how technology and is changing society. What would you say we ought to pay attention to in the nonprofit sector?

Bob Ottenhoff

Well, it seems to be in the DNA of most nonprofit leaders to say, “I need to do all of this myself.” And business leaders a long time ago said, “Wait a minute, what are we really good at? Maybe we’re not so good at IT. Maybe we’re not as good in IT as we thought we were.” So I think the first step is focusing on the core competencies of your nonprofit organization. What are the services you need to have within your organization versus the ones that you can partner with somebody else that can do it much better? I think the second thing, and this is a hard thing for boards to deal with, is that we’re still driven by thinking that solutions lie in organizations, rather than looking at what needs to get done and then coming up with the right organizational structure. So we’ve got lots of over duplication of nonprofits. We’ve got many nonprofits who serve just a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole solution. And so there’s a lot of overlap and that could be eliminated if we focused on the problem, rather than focused on sustaining our organizations. There’s a lot of talk right now in the nonprofit sector

about mergers and acquisitions, but it’s all talk. There’s very little that’s happening. And it’s because it’s hard to do in the nonprofit sector. But it’s another area for us to be thinking about.

QUESTION

What are your strategies for getting beyond the tyranny of the overhead ratio?

Bob Ottenhoff

It’s like saying I’m only going to fly airlines that spend the least amount on maintenance, right? I think nonprofits have to do a much better job of telling their story and saying, “Look, we’re investing in people, in technology, in our infrastructure because we can provide better service that way.” And so, I would start with the end result: Here’s what we’ve done. And here’s the difference we’ve made. And then you can back up and say, Here’s what it takes for us to be able to deliver those services. But it’s true, nonprofits have painted themselves into a corner. They say, None of your money will go at overhead. And I say, well, how do you do that? I mean, are you all volunteers? And you don’t pay electric bills? I mean, how is that possible?

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

Dennis Cheesebrow Founder and President, TeamWorks International

It’s indeed a pleasure and an honor to serve this role as a moderator for such a wonderful event. I am going to help us move towards action, which is a unique and distinct element of the Leadership Roundtable. After all, the purpose of the Leadership Roundtable is not only to talk, but to lead to change. Our hope is that this discussion leads to action and commitment.

I’d like to share four levels of reflections that have hit me in listening to all of the presentations, looking at what’s been put online on the blog (www.catholicstandardsforum.org), and walking into groups over the last day. The first is about preferences for collaboration. The second is about choices we can make on how we collaborate. The third is about a systemic view of how collaboration can work. Fourth is a strategic view to pay attention to when collaborating.

“ Collaboration is where abundance is found.”

Collaboration Preferences

First about collaboration preferences: if we’re going to collaborate, then let’s collaborate. To do so, we must act individually and as groups to operate in partnership rather than isolation. Over and over again it is a choice: do I choose partnership or isolation? That’s how preferences work. If you’re confused, chose one. If you’re confused about whether it should be about abundance or scarcity, choose abundance. There is so much more abundance we have to work with than most people realize. We may have thought we were being driven by scarcity, but, in fact, we are driven by discovering where the abundance is. Think about that next time someone says we don’t have enough money.

I was working with a group of 6 parishes when this question of scarcity came up. I told them, “The issue you have is too much money. You think you’re in scarcity when in fact you are overflowing with cash. Think about it. You are operating at over $20 million in cash, and you say you don’t have any.” It’s all about what you do with your money; it’s abundance versus scarcity.

Collaboration is where abundance is found. It is about laboring together in the mud versus trying to influence from afar and not be touched. So, again, we hear more and more that in service of the church, collaborations work better if we know that we have to labor together and do some hard work.

Choices in Collaboration

Our choice is about how we collaborate. It is important to think of the difference between mission and identity. In working with institutions within the Church as well as parishes and schools, I will tell you

Dennis Cheesebrow

“ It is important to think of the difference between mission and identity. In working with institutions within the Church as well as parishes and schools, I will tell you that when collaboration is not working, it’s because the mission of the parish is not the mission of the Church. Instead the parish is thinking about the preservation of identity.” “ We need to sit down and work out the mission and the core values first, and then begin to look at the others. ”

that when collaboration is not working, it’s because the mission of the parish is not the mission of the Church. Instead the parish is thinking about the preservation of identity. They don’t care about the mission of the Church. They’ll preserve their identity at all costs. So for positive collaboration, the mission is front and center and is shared by all of the organization. If you enter into a partnership hoping that you’re going to preserve your identity, to win, to control, to debate, to influence out of isolation and scarcity, it’s not going to work very well.

Systemic View of Collaboration

I was struck how many times in talking about collaboration, presenters and small groups were covering three different arenas of work. What is the work and purpose of our parishes, dioceses, schools, institutions, and organizations? What are the resources, human, financial and physical that we have? What is the culture or

mission on which we operate? And are we taking a systemic view? Every time it seemed that we were talking about successes and collaboration, the stories being told covered all these areas. I particularly heard that you have to pay attention to culture. Sometimes in our planning and sometimes in our collaboration we spend a lot of time working, talking about work and money and organization and structure. But as we heard this morning, we need to sit down and work out the mission and the core values first, and then begin to look at the others. You might wonder as you work in collaboration, to what degree does one pay attention to a systemic view, in which those preferences we talked about before might work.

Strategic View on Collaborations

Many times when organizations go into collaboration and strategic work, they confuse efficiency with capacity development. They think they’re the same. And yet strategy and collaboration gains clarity and coherence if you can differentiate between efficiency work and capacity building work. Many times when you’re engaged in efficiency work, the end is somewhat determined: you’re operating within the current frame of reference; think of work, structure, culture. We’re trying to do much of the same thing in much of the same way, better, cheaper, more effectively. That’s efficiency improvement. Many times that work is actually largely management work. It’s end-determined to a great degree. And sometimes you need to do that in order to do capacity development work, which is quite different. Capacity development is an end view. You don’t have the answers, you can’t manage your way, you have to partner and collaborate your way into a new understanding. Efficiency is almost always an old frame of reference. Sometimes it is not just about having more, sometimes it’s about doing

differently. Capacity development is about doing things differently. Efficiency work is doing the same thing faster, quicker, better. For your own collaborations, what is the difference between the efficiency work that you’re collaborating around versus the capacity development work?

One way of looking at this is that many times when you do capacity development work you have to increase the capacity first before you can increase the efficiency of it. It’s a legitimate strategy. And what struck me this morning during Carolyn Woo’s talk is that it is CRS’s strategy. When CRS does emergency work, they don’t collaborate, they know exactly what they need to do, because there is urgency. Then they stabilize and then transform. It’s a simple way of looking at a strategic view of collaboration.

Questions for Reflection

Where and whom do you serve? What preferences are present or what preferences are needed for collaboration? Think of a single collaboration you’re involved in or thinking about. Which of these are present and which of these are needed for that collaboration to work? Where are they shared, and what are the divergent systemic views? Where are you together with those who are collaborating, where are you apart? In this collaboration you’re engaged in, where is increased efficiency needed? Where’s capacity development needed? And what influences will authority, power, and politics play?

SELECTED QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND INSIGHTS

Rev. J. Bryan Hehir

Archdiocese of Boston

Trustee, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

Looking at the Church in the United States, multiple dioceses over the next 10 to 15 years will be involved and already are involved in the work of restructuring and reorganizing due to fewer clergy, reduced parishes, larger engagement of the laity, etc. My sense is that this is a three-step process.

Firstly, you recognize the need to do it, and by this time I think almost everybody recognizes a need to do business differently. Secondly, you need good theology and good pastoral sensitivity to design a plan to do it differently, and that requires good theological grounding. It takes pastoral sensitivity in terms of the needs of people, the stress on people, ethnic and religious communities, and how we deal with that. The third step is implementation. I’m not positive we’re ready to do that well. In my own diocese, we’re going from 292 parishes to 125, what we call, pastoral sites. If you go back 8 more years from where we are, we’ve gone from 370 to 125. It seems to me if there were corporation doing that, a bank doing that, a governmental organization doing that, the military doing that, that would be regarded as a major structural change.

I think we’re going to need to deal with this over the next 10 to 15 years in the Church in the United States, to get to the point where our organization matches our pastoral challenge.

Connecting the Dots

Trish Sullivan Vanni Publisher Liturgical Press

One of the things I would like to see the Leadership Roundtable do more actively is what Carolyn Woo expressed to us, which is to become a mechanism by which the dots get connected. One of the pitfalls of any organization that sees needs and then starts developing projects and programs is to add to the pool of what’s already there. And as someone who led two national ministries, one of the things I know is that we have an abundance of organizations serving the vitality and ministry of the church. Many of them find themselves in competition for resources because they’re serving comparable constituencies with nuanced different approaches.

The Toolbox for Pastoral Management is an example of where there are comparable sorts of things happening. You need to be less engaged with creating new products and more engaged with breaking through boundaries, because the nature of our gov -

ernance prevents that. The nature of our governance keeps everyone looking locally to their bishop as the governing factor, the decision maker and the way we sort of operationalize and organize our ministry. The much harder thing is to learn from other dioceses how to tackle challenges.

So this idea of being the force that creates constellations versus more stars in the galaxy is something I would like to see happen with the Leadership Roundtable. In doing that, you would empower executive directors of ministry organizations to, in turn, empower their constituencies to engage more meaningfully in these long-established not-for-profit ministry groups that are suffering. This is important because as parish dollars deplete, their members are less equipped to pony up the membership, to engage new ministry folks in participating in the organizations, and by nature of the market forces, get more and more insular.

Geoffrey Boisi

Chair, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

Chair and CEO, Roundtable Investment Partners, LLC

Trish Sullivan Vanni

Geoff Boisi

Part of the purpose of creating the Leadership Roundtable was to identify best practices and communicate them throughout the system. In developing our strategy from the beginning, we reached out to a broad group of people and we identified over recommendations, distilled it down to 44, and then further refined to a more manageable set of goals. This was then communicated back to the group, and we started to prioritize based on areas in need of best practices. These are the ones that we have focused on in terms of trying to develop a program, a product, or a service. In doing that, we weren’t looking to recreate the wheel. That’s the last thing that we want to do.

And so what we tend to do is to find other organizations that are doing something similar and, if need be, try to do it better. One of the issues that confronts us all, though, now that we’ve been at it for several years, is how we reach scale and how we communicate throughout the entire spectrum of the Catholic Church. We naively thought in the beginning that the main communicator was the Conference of Bishops, but we’ve learned over the last several years that that’s not the way that the system works and the Catholic Church is much bigger than that. Even though the diocesan infrastructure and the parish infrastructure is very important and you have to deal with it, you know, that’s only a portion of the Catholic community. You all represent parts of the rest of the Catholic community because you’re representing major non-profit organizations that are focused on the industry.

And so what we’re trying to do now is to figure out strategies for taking these good ideas that are, in fact, around the Church, whether we’ve identified them or helped

create them, and how do you start to bring them to scale. And if I would say if there’s a disappointment, from my standpoint, is that we haven’t been able to figure out the magic bullet for getting some of these things to scale more quickly. So any thoughts that people have and suggestions for us, in ways of doing that, we would be particularly appreciative.

William Glover Director of Information Services Archdiocese of Baltimore

I think there’s a lot of good work that’s being done by some organizations to bring collaboration among disciplines, such as the Association of Catholic Publishers and the organization that I’m with, the Diocesan Information Systems Conference (DISC). At DISC, we’re beginning to leverage and partner with organizations like the Leadership Roundtable and others to bring some continuity, because, ultimately we’re a symbiotic organization. I know within the dioceses, if a parish is hurting or a school is hurting, it hurts the whole diocese. Similarly, if a diocese is

hurting, it hurts the Church. If it’s a Catholic organization, it has a tendency to affect other Catholic organizations. If there’s a way to bring those partnerships and formulate those, I’d suggest that might be something to look at.

Paul Henderson Director of Planning and Communications Operations United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

That’s a great question about scale. I have found over the past 24 years that there has to be a real need rather than just a want. A bishop, or whoever the decision maker is, has to really need it rather than just want it. There’s a window of opportunity that opens, and if you’ve got the game plan to jump into that window of opportunity, something really effective happens. It’s really about getting the right relationships.

It’s also about having patience and being in the right position. As part of the institution, if you’re in the right position, sometimes you can jump on the opportunity and make something happen. If you’re not in the right position, then the window isn’t always open. One example of this was World Youth Day in 1993. The organizers saw it as an opportunity to do something more than the stated reality. The stated reality was simply that you bring a whole bunch of kids together with the Holy Father. The strategy behind the organizers was to change the dynamic of the relationship between the US Church and the Holy See by using young people, in a sense, to do it, then to connect the bishops with the young people.

Bill Glover

Dialogue and Future Generations of Catholics

Fr. Robert Beloin Chaplain

Saint Thomas More Chapel & Center at Yale University

When I think of the preference between dialogue and debate, I was thinking back to Cardinal Bernardin, who called for a common ground initiative. I think it was the first time that Cardinals publically opposed each other, but Cardinals Law and O’Connor on the East Coast castigated him for this watering down of theology. My question is, what are strategies for addressing a conflict about the value of dialogue? Students say to me that when they hear what the bishops say, they sound like grandparents talking to rebellious teenagers. It isn’t an adult-to-adult conversation, and the culture of dialogue that we had with Cardinal Bernardin, for example, seems to be something of a happy memory. I’m just wondering, are their strategies for addressing the value of dialogue when that is such a point of contention in the church?

Dennis Cheesebrow

I would offer you a view from having experience working with communities around the issues of race, which might have some parallels here. When there are those divisions, it’s because the dialogue never gets into people willing to look at and respect each other’s experience, their thinking, their feeling, and what they want. So what they do is they debate around the position, but they actually don’t get a shared reality of each other. One book I’ve found to be extremely helpful is called Clear Leadership by Gervase Bushe. And it is, in fact, one of the dialogue methodologies that we use that I’ve found to be helpful. And possibly, it might help in a situation like that.

James Dubik

Lt. Gen. (Ret.), US Army Trustee, National Leadership Roundtable on

Church Management

I’ve been in organizations in which healthy dialogue was part of daily life, and in other organizations in which you didn’t say anything until the commander said something and you had to agree with him. The first type of organization only emerged when the senior most leader encouraged it, modeled it, and exampled it. In other words, it didn’t happen naturally. The higher I rose in rank, the less dialogue occurred unless I pushed it. If it’s not valued by the leaders, it is not going to be exampled in the organization.

Ellie Cloughtery

ESTEEM Participant Stanford University

I’m actually hoping to form some kind of youth coalition to address your concerns if I’m invited to do so. I’d love to provide whatever services I can, and I’ve had a really great time with this ESTEEM program, and I’m really excited that this community is forming. I would say that the biggest thing that I learned from ESTEEM is that

there were 20 of us who met every two weeks to talk about our faith and we touched upon every possible issue, from how we experience our faith in our own lives, to how we view Jesus, Catholicism, science, and business. There’s a really cool springboard for how I interact with my faith in other areas of my life, and I want to continue to do so.

The youth experience a huge degree of uncertainty. Most of us are unemployed, we have no strong financial security, and we don’t know our calling. So I would say that mentorship is crucial. I was talking about this earlier in the workgroups; we all have different identities that we can fall back on. We went to different colleges, we’re from different areas, but if we can develop what it means to have a Catholic identity, outside of just Mass, and in business settings, in medicine, in law, I think that could have a profound effect on the future of the Church.

Bernie Nojadera

Executive Director, Child and Youth Protection, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Just in terms of the statistics and demographics, we have 20 to 30 percent of

Ellie Cloughtery

Bernie Nojadera

Catholics right now that are just practicing but not necessarily practicing in the manner in which they’re fully participating as a fully initiated Catholic in the life of the Church. We fall far short of that call to full ownership because we’re becoming a Church in which we only go to Mass to get something out of it. The reality is that Sunday should just be the beginning.

So the challenge or question that I propose to the group is how do we communicate a message that is relevant and how to use available resources to reach those we haven’t reached yet? What we’re doing is talking to those who have already converted. We need to get to the ones who claim to be Catholic but have no clue what that means and who have no idea what we’re talking about when we talk about mission.

We’re running into relationships, partnerships with businesses that find it refreshing to be able to give back to society. For example, we have our relationship right now with Stonebridge Business Partners who are auditing dioceses. We just met with them last week. And to talk to those auditors and to see the commitment, the compassion, the drive, the motivation, the determination to be part of that solution in trying to make this Church a better Church.

At the same time we need to reinvigorate and reenergize the enthusiasm of what it means to be a Catholic and to find that passion again. That’s what many of our saints had to do. They were seen as off-the-rocker, crazy, or whatever the case may be, but they stuck to their convictions.

In terms of the importance of mentorship, who are our role models? Are we celebrating these role models?

Jim Dubik

As I was listening to several conversations, I thought that might be one theme that we would consider for next year’s conference: reenergizing or reinvigorating Catholic life in a variety of ways in schools and parish life. But the one that Fr. Bryan Hehir, a Leadership Roundtable trustee, suggested also that there’s a huge potential in conducting some kind of scenario-based simulation. Playing a game, so to speak, although the real dioceses are going through it, but sometimes when you create a scenario, you learn a heck of a lot from it and can derive a lot of good insights from a simulation to help you, then, when you have to go through it for real.

Conclusion and Adjournment

Kerry Robinson Executive Director

National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

It has been a long, full, vibrant, contentrich two days. On behalf of the board and my colleagues on the staff, I thank you so much for your participation and your leadership. Truly, there is no challenge that is so great that we can’t meet those challenges as long as we collaborate together.

We have everything it takes, in this room and in the wider Church, and we will be connecting those dots.

When we were created, we set forth a series of guiding principles, maxims, and charisms that we hold ourselves accountable to as the Leadership Roundtable. One of those is that we emulate what we advocate, and from the very beginning it has been a matter of pride for us that every project, program, or resource that we have created, everything you see in your folder has been done intentionally in partnership with others. There’s nothing we have created on our own, and this partnership and collaboration has been key to the fruitfulness and efficacy of what we offer the church.

I want to thank the speakers and facilitators, those who led us in prayer, the scribes, all of you for participating. A particular thank you to Michael O’Loughlin and Michael Brough who shouldered much of the organization and the flawlessness of these two days. I am indebted. It’s an uncommon joy to truly love, appreciate, and respect one’s colleagues, and I am in that luxurious position.

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

Appendix 1

2012 ANNUAL MEETING

PRESENTER AND FACILITATOR BIOGRAPHIES

Br. Paul Bednarczyk, CSC is the executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference. He oversees the organization of approximately 1000 members in 22 countries. Within this capacity, he serves as a consultant to the U.S. Bishops Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations. Brother Paul has published several articles on vocation ministry in Horizon, Momentum, Vision, and Review for Religious.

Geoffrey T. Boisi is chairman and chief executive officer of Roundtable Investment Partners LLC, an independent private investment partnership generating high performance wealth creation and social legacy-building opportunities, and founding chairman of The Leadership Roundtable. He is also chairman of Carleon Capital Partners and co-founder of MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership. He serves on many boards of directors at educational, philanthropic, and charitable organizations.

Paul V. Butler is the president of GlobalEdg, a leadership development consulting firm. Paul works with senior executives in organizations to increase capabilities of individuals, teams, and organizations. With over 30 years of experience in the public and private sectors, he is well positioned to support organizations going through large-scale change efforts and produce sustainable results.

B.J. Cassin is the chairman and president of the Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation, which he founded in August of 2000, and a trustee of The Leadership Roundtable. In 1969, Mr. Cassin co-founded Xidex Corporation, which achieved Fortune 500 status in 1987 with sales of $752 million and 7,000 employees worldwide. In addition to serving on many boards of educational and charitable institutions, he is the chairman of the board of the Cristo Rey Network.

Dennis Cheesebrow is founder of Teamworks International. He is a leader, organizational coach, and consultant with over 20 years of experience in creating insight, alignment, and action through the power of the FrameWorks™ processes. A broad background and experiences in business, management, marketing, product development, engineering, manufacturing, public speaking, education, and church ministry is leveraged on a daily basis in creating value and service to his clients.

Rev. Frank Donio, S.A.C., D.Min., is director of the Catholic Apostolate Center. He is also vicar provincial and director of formation of the Immaculate Conception Province of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate (Pallottines) and rector of Pallottine Seminary at Green Hill in West Hyattsville, MD. Fr. Frank serves as Forum Coordinator of CatholicPastor.org, a Leadership Roundtable initiative. Fr. Frank serves on several boards and is former chairperson of the board of trustees of Washington Theological Union.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James M. Dubik joined the staff of the National Leadership Roundtable after relinquishing command of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq and the NATO Training Mission-Iraq on July 3, 2008. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and the Institute of Land Warfare, a senior consultant with Tucker Associates, and has been named as the 2012-2013 recipient of the General Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership sponsored by Penn State Law, Dickinson College, and the U.S. Army War College.

John Eriksen is the superintendent of schools in the Diocese of Paterson, NJ. He began his career as a high school teach in Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) before moving to the Leadership Roundtable where he headed the organization’s management consulting practice. Mr. Eriksen is the co-chair of the Leadership Roundtable’s Catholic Schools Initiative.

Sr. Helen Maher Garvey is a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Dubuque, Iowa. She has served in leadership in her own congregation, was the president of LCWR and the US delegate to the International Union of Superiors General, has served on numerous boards, ministered as the director of pastoral services for the Diocese of Lexington, KY, worked as an educator and school administrator, was the director of the Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America exhibit, and is now serving as an organizational consultant.

William A. Glover is the chief information officer and director of information technology for the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Bill is the President of the Diocesan Information Systems Conference and holds board positions with the United Way of Central Maryland and the Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium. Bill is presently a diocesan advisor to ParishSOFT, LLC and has been an advisor to

the Maryland CIO Roundtable, Apple’s PowerSchool IT Advisory Council, and the University of Notre Dame Task Force on the Financial Health of Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools.

Charles T. Harris III is the founder of SeaChange Capital Partners and is portfolio manager and director at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. He spent 23 years in the banking business before retiring in 2002 from his position as a partner and managing director at Goldman Sachs, where he served as co-head of the East Coast High Technology Group in the firm’s Investment Banking Division and as co-head of Corporate Finance in the Americas. He sits on the boards of several nonprofit and philanthropic organizations and has served extensively on the boards of both private and public for-profit corporations.

Rev. Paul A. Holmes, STD has been a professor of moral and sacramental theology at Seton Hall University since 1988. He was the university’s first vice president for Mission, interim dean of the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and executive vice president. Having helped inaugurate an interdisciplinary therapeutic outpatient program for priests in 1992, he has recently returned to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Westchester as the program’s spiritual director. He is the coordinator of the Leadership Roundtable’s Toolbox for Pastoral Management.

Kathleen A. Mahoney, Ph.D., is a consultant working with foundations and nonprofit organizations in project management, strategic planning and evaluation. She is the recent past president of Porticus North America Foundation, and she has held academic posts at Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana UniversityPurdue University at Indianapolis, and the Lynch School of Education at Boston College where she founded the Institute for Administrators in Catholic Higher Education. She is the author of Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University.

Bob McCarty, D.Min., is executive director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry. He offers workshops and training programs in ministry skills and issues internationally. His recent books include Thriving in Youth Ministry, The Vision of Catholic Youth Ministry: Fundamentals, Theory and Practice, Be A Champion for Youth: Standing With, By and For Young People, co-authored with his wife, Maggie, and, Raising Happy, Healthy and Holy Teenagers: A Primer for Parents.

Bob Ottenhoff is president and CEO of Guidestar. He has 25 years of management experience in public broadcasting and high-tech companies, including 9 years as chief operating officer of PBS. He currently serves on the board of Vision TV, Grameen Foundation USA, Link TV, and Write on Sports. He is a sought-after writer and speaker on nonprofit and philanthropic issues, and he has been frequently quoted in television, radio and leading publications such as the New York Times, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

Peter A. Persuitti is managing director at Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. He is a seasoned executive who has a view of the religious and nonprofit sector from both sides, as a university dean, faith-based foundation executive, boarding school administrator and teacher, founder of an all boys’ primary school, and as a practice group corporate leader for the world’s largest reinsurer and leading broker and consultant. He was instrumental in mobilizing the national response of the Roman Catholic sexual misconduct crisis with the creation of the “Virtus” program.

Kerry A. Robinson is the executive director of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management. She serves on many charitable, educational, and philanthropic boards. Kerry is the founding editor of The Catholic Funding Guide: A Directory of Resources for Catholic Activities and was the director of development for St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University, leading a multi-million dollar fundraising drive to expand and endow the Chapel’s intellectual and spiritual ministry and to construct a Catholic student center.

Rev. Larry Snyder is president of Catholic Charities USA. Pope Benedict XVI named him to the Pontifical Council Cor Unum in 2007, which oversees the Church’s charitable activities around the world. As the president of Caritas North America from 20062011, Father Snyder also served as a vice president of Caritas Internationalis. President Barack Obama appointed Father Snyder the newly created President’s Advisory Council of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009. Fr. Snyder is the author of Think and Act Anew: How Poverty in America Affects Us All and What We Can Do About It.

W. Brian Walsh is the founder and president of Faith Direct, Inc. He is a board member of the Catholic Volunteer Network, and chairs the development committee and serves on the executive committee. Brian’s development experience has helped raise over one billion dollars for many high profile charitable and Catholic clients. He has presented at multiple conferences on philanthropy and he is considered a leading authority on eGiving.

Theresa Witherell is national representative for strategic initiatives for Catholic Extension. Her experience includes working in youth ministry, campus ministry, and teaching in Catholic schools, as well as fifteen years in career advising to undergraduate and graduate students.

Carolyn Woo is president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services. Before CRS, she served as the dean of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame from 1997. During her tenure, the Mendoza College achieved number 1 ranking (BusinessWeek/Bloomberg) in 2010 and 2011. Prior to the University of Notre Dame, Dr. Woo served as associate executive vice president for academic affairs at Purdue University.

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

MANAGING FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

Appendix 2

2012 ANNUAL MEETING PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES

Mr. Richard Abdoo is president of R.A. Abdoo & Company, LLC.

Mr. Paul Ainslie is alternative investments specialist and investment advisor at Christian Brothers Investment Services.

Ms. Kathleen Almaney is board chair of Christian Brothers Investment Services.

Msgr. Edward Arsenault is president and CEO of Saint Luke Institute.

Rev. Patrick Baikauskas is pastor and director of campus ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas Center at The Catholic Center at Purdue University.

Br. Paul Bednarczyk is executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference.

Rev. Robert Beloin is chaplain at Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University.

Mr. Geoffrey Boisi is chairman and CEO of Roundtable Investment Partners, LLC, and chairman of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Alex Boucher is project administrator of CatholicPastor.org, a project of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Michael Brough is director of strategic engagement at the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Paul Butler is president of GlobalEdg.

Dr. William Cahoy is dean of Saint John’s School of Theology-Seminary.

Mr. Patrick Carolan is executive director of Franciscan Action Network.

Mr. B.J. Cassin is chairman of Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Rev. John Celichowski is provincial minister of Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order.

Mr. Dennis Cheesebrow is president of TeamWorks International.

Ms. Ellie Cloughtery is a participant in the ESTEEM program at Stanford University.

Mr. Francis Coleman is executive vice president of Christian Brothers Investment Services.

Msgr. Joseph Corbett is vicar general of the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

Ms. Margaret Cuccinello is director of advancement at Maryknoll Missioners.

Mr. Peter Denio is Standards for Excellence project manager for the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Ms. Mary Jane Doerr is associate director, Child and Youth Protection, at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. James Donahue is president of the Graduate Theological Union.

Rev. Frank Donio, S.A.C. is director of the Catholic Apostolate Center.

Ms. Elizabeth Donnelly is a trustee of the Mary J. Donnelly Foundation.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James Dubik is a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. John Eriksen is superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Paterson and co-coordinator of the Leadership Roundtable’s Catholic Schools Initiative.

Mr. Peter Faletti is master planner of the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

Mr. Kevin FitzGerald is a canon law student from Raleigh, NC.

Mr. John Fontana is director of the Arrupe Program in Social Ethics for Business at Woodstock Theological Center.

Mr. Fred Fosnacht is founder of MyCatholicVoice.

Dr. Carol Fowler is director of personnel services of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Most Rev. William B. Friend is bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Shreveport.

Sr. Helen Maher Garvey, BVM is a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and coordinator of the LCWR history project responsible for Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America.

Mr. Daniel Gast is director of INSPIRE at Loyola University Chicago and the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Rev. Thomas Gaunt, SJ is executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA).

Mr. Tom Gordon is COO of Catholic Extension.

Mr. Charles Harris III is founder of Capital SeaChange Partners.

Mr. Thomas Healey is a partner at Healey Development and treasurer of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Rev. J. Bryan Hehir is secretary for Health and Social Services of the Archdiocese of Boston and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Paul Henderson is director of planning and communications operations at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Rev. Paul Holmes, STD is distinguished university professor of servant leadership at Seton Hall University and project manager of the Toolbox for Pastoral Management.

Ms. Candy Hill is senior vice president for social policy and government affairs at Catholic Charities USA.

Dr. Mary Ellen Hrutka is executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Catholic Schools Consortium.

Rev. John Hurley, CSP is executive director of the Department of Evangelization of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Sr. Mary Johnson is professor of sociology at Emmanuel College.

Mr. Rob Kearney is a regional representative at Catholic Relief Services.

Ms. Margaret Keightley is executive director of advancement at the Catholic Diocese of Richmond.

Rev. Kevin C. Kennedy is lecturer at The Catholic University of America.

Rev. Mr. John Kerrigan is deacon of the Catholic Community at Stanford.

Mr. Kevin Kiley is director of budget and planning at the Archdiocese of Boston.

Rev. Mr. Bill Koniers is president of CathoNet, LLC.

Mr. Jim Lundholm-Eades is director of services and planning at the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Ms. Bernadette Luongo Hoye is director of communcations at the Diocese of San Jose.

Msgr. James Mahoney is vicar general of the Diocese of Paterson.

Dr. Kathleen Mahoney is project director for the NRVC/CARA study on educational debt and vocations.

Ms. Deirdre Malacrea is director of communications and marketing at RENEW International.

Mr. Robert McCarty is executive director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Ms. Kathleen McChesney is CEO of Kinsale Consulting and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Patrick McClain is a human resources professional.

Mr. H. Richard McCord is senior consultant of The Reid Group.

Dr. Peter McDonough is professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

Mr. Kevin McGowan is CFO of Catholic Extension.

Mr. Patrick McGrory is chairman of Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities.

Ms. Katie McKenna is development and communications officer at the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Mark Mogilka is director of stewardship and pastoral services of the Diocese of Green Bay.

Rev. Donald Monan, SJ is chancellor of Boston College and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Ms. Joan Neal is vice president of institutional planning and effectiveness at Cabrini College.

Mr. Bernie Nojadera is executive director, Child and Youth Protection, at the U.S. Conference at the Catholic Bishops.

Mr. Michael O’Loughlin is communications manager at the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. David Odom is executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School.

Mr. Robert Ottenhoff is president and CEO of Guidestar.

Ms. Mariann Payne is director of advancement at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

Mr. Dominic Perri is principal consultant at Essential Conversations.

Mr. Peter Persuitti is managing director, religious and nonprofit practice, at Arthur J. Gallagher and Co.

Mr. Richard Powers is former advisory director at Morgan Stanley and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. Brian Reynolds is chancellor of the Archdiocese of Louisville.

Ms. Kerry Robinson is executive director of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Ms. Darla Romfo is president of Children’s Scholarship Fund and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Sr. Annmarie Sanders, IHM is associate director for communications at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Mr. J. Peter Simon is co-chairman of William E. Simon Foundation.

Rev. Larry Snyder is president of Catholic Charities USA.

Mr. Anthony Spence is director and editor in chief of Catholic News Service.

Mr. Sam Stanton is executive director of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners.

Rev. Gerry Stockhausen, SJ is executive secretary/socius with Jesuit Conference USA.

Ms. Barbara Sutton is associate dean of outreach and formation at St. John’s University, School of Theology.

Rev. Thomas Sweetser, SJ is director of Parish Evaluation Project.

Mr. David Turner is professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biology at Upstate Medical University.

Ms. Trish Vanni is publisher at Liturgical Press.

Rev. Jeffrey Von Arx, SJ is president of Fairfield University.

Rev. Jack Wall is president of Catholic Church Extension Society and a trustee of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Mr. W. Brian Walsh is president of Faith Direct.

Ms. Penny Warne is pastoral associate of Holy Spirit Parish.

Mr. Richard Wasilauskas is president of Catholic Purchasing Services.

Mr. Kevin Watson is with the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.

Ms. Theresa Witherell is national representative for Strategic Initiatives of Catholic Extension.

Dr. Regina Wolfe is senior Wicklander fellow at the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University.

Ms. Carolyn Woo is the president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services.

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management MANAGING

FOR MISSION: B UILDING STRATEGIC COLLABORATIONS TO STRENGTHEN THE CHURCH

2012 Annual Meeting | Georgetown University | June 27-28, 2012 www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/2012AnnualMeeting

LEADERSHIP

Appendix 3

Visit www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org/Publications to download copies of previous publications.

Managing for Mission: Building Strategic Collborations to Strengthen the Church

Topics include partnership, connecting with funders, lessons from the US Army, and the end of assumed virtue for nonprofits. (2012)

A Blueprint for Responsibility: Responding to Crises with Collaborative Solutions

Topics include the case for transparency and accountability in a global church, the lessons learned from the sex abuse crisis in the US, and philanthropy and accountability in uncertain economic times. (2010)

Managerial Excellence: Engaging the Faith Community in Leadership in the Church Today.

Topics include a parish ministry assessment tool, best practices from model parishes, and challenges and solutions in Church strategic planning. (2008)

Bringing Our Gifts to the Table: Creating Conditions for Financial Health in the Church

Topics include effective diocesan planning and the power of economies of scale in the Church. (2006)

From Aspirations to Action: Solutions for America’s

Catholic Schools

Topics include the case for Catholic schools, creating a culture of excellence, and 94 recommendations to strengthen Catholic schools. (2011)

Clarity, Candor and Conviction: Effective Communications for a Global Church.

Topics include the future of communications, the growing Catholic Latino population in the U.S., and transcripts of keynote addresses from Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bishop Gerald Kicanas. (2009)

Give Us Your Best: A Look at Church Service for a New Generation.

Topics include identifying the next generation of Church leaders and ministers, and recruiting the very best for Church service. (2007)

The Church in America: Leadership Roundtable 2005A Call to Excellence in the Church (2005)

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

Santa Clara University

Santa Clara, California

JUNE 26-27, 2013

Registration Opens in January 2013 at www.TheLeadershipRoundtable/AnnualMeeting

National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management