EXCELLENCE AT WORK: STORIES FROM THE FIELD

needs. We now have 10 years of projects under our belt and 10 years of people who have been touched by these experiences. Today we’re going to focus on three areas where we’ve done significant work – the Toolbox for Pastoral Management, ESTEEM and Catholic Standards for Excellence – as seen through the lives and work of people who have benefitted.

When people ask us, ‘What does the Leadership Roundtable do?’ we start by going through a litany of branded items and various programs that have emerged. But what we’ve really done is carve out a temporal area of the Church and tried to define how we can improve as professionals the running of institutions that have temporal and business qualifications and

I remember being called to the bishop’s office two years into my priestly ministry and thinking, what did I do wrong? Instead, the bishop told me he was naming me administrator – it became pastor a few months after that – of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, the biggest church in the biggest parish of the Diocese of San Diego. There are 9,000 families registered in my parish. We have 12 Sunday Masses celebrated in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, and an Italian Mass once a month. We also have a parish school.

After a few weeks of settling in, I asked myself, How am I going to do this? How am I going to take on St. Francis? So I began to do some research on methods and tools to help me become the best pastor I possibly could, and came upon the Toolbox for Pastoral Management. I realized how perfect it sounded, and wound up attending the Toolbox session in Tucson, Arizona about a year and a half ago. It was probably the best week of my two years as pastor at St. Francis.

I was struggling in all areas of the parish, and needed all the help I could get, particularly from a human resources perspective. Our staff morale was very low. We were losing families left and right at the school (in a two-month period we lost 43 students). We were also losing parishioners to neighboring parishes. From an administration standpoint, it didn’t help that the seminary I attended never taught us how to read a balance sheet or profit and loss statement. I knew I needed to do something.

I’m delighted to say the Toolbox for Pastoral Management provided me with tools I could incorporate into my parish, tools that could help me handle challenges like getting the entire parish community engaged, and reforming the parish council. When I went to my first parish council meeting I learned we had about 150 voting members, each with their own opinion on how to run the parish. These meetings would run five to six hours. In addition, I had staff who would come to work at 10 a.m. and leave at 3 p.m. -- who were getting paid over $60,000 a year. I inherited a debt of $180,000 my first year. Things weren’t adding up.

The Toolbox has not only transformed my life, but the life of my parish. Most of the families that left our school have returned. Our parish registrations have increased. And we ended up with a surplus of $68,000 last year. These things couldn’t have happened without the good work of our people and the support of the Toolbox for Pastoral Management.

I participated in ESTEEM from 2012 to 2013, while a student at Michigan State University. There were about 14 people in our young adult leadership program. We met every two weeks, learning how to take our Catholic faith out into the greater Catholic community after graduation, and how to use our careers and goals to better the Church, while figuring out our roles.

At our ESTEEM meetings we’d talk about a variety of things, including dignity of life and social issues. We also had a really cool mentorship program in which our mentors were aligned with our career goals. This not only enhanced our learning experience but showed us how our skills and interests might fit into the mission of the Church. We ended the year with a Capstone Conference at St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University bringing together all 12 universities participating in ESTEEM. The discussions centered on what we had learned throughout the year and how to become young adult leaders in the Church.

Something that really stuck with me as part of ESTEEM was Catholic social teaching. I believe that many young people when they hear ‘religion’ and ‘Catholic Church’ think of a lot of rules and regulations. So we discussed current issues like birth control and gay rights, euthanasia and abortion, treating them as hot topics that are really important to young adults today. Specifically, we talked about the Church’s stance on each of these issues so we too could take a stand informed by our faith. activities I was constantly comparing the Church world to the business world. There was such a disconnect for me as I kept asking, ‘If this is so simple in the business world, why don’t we have a comparable way to do it in the Church?’

Upon graduating from Michigan State University in the spring of 2013, I was inspired to do a year of service to branch out and put into practice those Catholic social teachings I learned through the ESTEEM. I joined Amate House, which is a young adult volunteer program throughout the Archdiocese of Chicago.

I lived in community with 12 other volunteers for a year and got the chance to live out our Catholic social values, and learn about community. During my time at Amate House, I worked for a nonprofit organization called Girls in the Game, where I coordinated and implemented health curriculums in after school programs in different Southside and Westside Chicago neighborhoods.

As for the future, I’ll be going to graduate school in the fall, working toward a Masters in Public Health. And I plan to be active in whatever young professional programs they have at my school. Too often today young adults are uncertain what their role is in the Church. ESTEEM really opened my eyes – it inspired me and showed me that I can make a difference in the Church even in my twenties.

My story doesn’t start with the Church. It starts with beans, Bush’s Beans, specifically. I spent 24 years in sales and marketing, the last 18 with Bush’s Baked Beans. Born and raised as a Catholic, I also became increasingly active in my parish, serving as parish council president for a long time and chair of the finance board, while working on a number of strategic events. And during the course of those

As background, our diocese is the third youngest in the country. We went from 30,000 Catholics when we were formed in 1988 to 65,000 today. As a result, we struggled a bit because we moved from being infants to teenagers, and now we need to behave like adults. How do we put processes together that would allow us to do that? The Catholic Standards for Excellence told us how. I went to their website, started downloading some of the resources, and realized this is simple stuff. It’s not that complicated. You take it off the shelf and if doesn’t fit, maybe something else does in your environment.

We rolled out the Standards in three of our parishes, engaging laypeople, pastors, and the parish councils. The Leadership Roundtable played a pivotal role in the implementation, while I served as sort of a champion and cheerleader. They came to the first meetings with each of the parishes, separately, and helped us to understand their uniqueness, including their struggles and what they were good at and not so good at. Then we brought the three parishes together and, with the help of the Roundtable, went through each of the 55 Standards and how they could empower each parish to meet its goals and priorities.

That process took about a year and a half. I’m happy to say that those three parishes are nearing the end and will soon earn the Seal of Excellence from the Catholic Standards for Excellence program. Even more impressive is what we’ve accomplished in a very short time. We wrote our first strategic plan. For the first time the pastor engaged the laity in the budget process. We’ve done assessments of our Chancery staff and Catholic Charities organization, which have led to a much broader understanding of their needs and gaps. We’ve also done an assessment to ensure we have the right people working on the right things with the right processes so that we’re not stepping over each other and making mistakes. And we’ve created a Pastoral Services team to discuss the things we need to do as a Chancery for the parishes.

Through its advisory role, the Roundtable has been instrumental in all of this. In sum, the Standards for Excellence are allowing us to be effective and to do our jobs better – without reinventing the wheel. The Standards are there for the taking, and they’re easy to integrate into your culture. I’m happy to report we have three more parishes ready to introduce the program. We have a total of 51 parishes in our diocese, and it’s just a matter of time before they all get exposure to the Catholic Standards for Excellence.