Hehir, president of Catholic Charities since 2004, will be succeeded by one of his former students, Tiziana Dearing, who since 2003 has been the executive director of Harvard's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. She will be the first woman to head the organization.
Dearing, 36, a former management consultant, lists among her research interests at Harvard "the functioning and governance of the Catholic Church as a nonprofit organization."
This caught my eye because of my attending one of the Parish Council retreats in the late 1990s. The nun brought in to give a presentation took issue with our new long-range plan's mention of volunteerism, so big big an issue she seemed to regard it as needing no explanation. Since this was Parish Council, our perspective was that Sister's presentation, like all presentations, was another item to be checked off the agenda, and volunteerism remained part of the plan, at least in theory.
Since Sister didn't spell it out, I came to assume the problem with volunteerism is the connotation of growing from self-sown seed, in contrast to the parable of the sower and the seed.
So after hearing that service in the Church is essentially different than in other not-for-profit organizations, I now see Ms. Dearing making no distinction, and leaves unclear whether the call comes from within or without.
"I've been working with nonprofits and made a very conscious choice that that's where I wanted to spend my life," Dearing said. " That was largely due to feeling called to the social mission of the church. I feel a strong sense of calling to take the job, and I think it's because my call to nonprofits in general came from my faith. It came from being influenced by economic justice for all, and it came from a sense that service needs to be a core part of who you are."
No comments:
Post a Comment