Engaged Laity: A Case Study of a Certificate in Catholic Leadership

Are you a leader who is Catholic or a Catholic leader? This is one of the fundamental questions for participants in the Certificate in Catholic Leadership program at St. Jerome’s University. This non-credit program runs on an employer sponsorship model; organizations such as school boards, parishes, and non-profits send a range of participants for the year long experiential program that includes lectures and other foundational teachings, a local or international service learning experience, a cohort retreat, and a capstone project that brings something back to their home organization. Participants are supported both by liaisons at their organization and assigned mentors. The program was designed to meet the needs articulated by church and school leadership who identified a need to help form leaders and engaged laity. In particular, a gap was identified for people who need more than a workshop or in-service training but want something less than a Masters degree– either because they are in the season of family life that might make a traditional program too much of a commitment or because they are already (multiply) credentialed and simply want something more focused.

Data captured for the purpose of assessing the program highlight that participants would easily qualify as “leaders who are Catholic” not depending on how you define Catholic but requiring an openness to identifying leadership roles with varying job and volunteer titles. In a pre-program survey, most participants indicate their personal faith is important to them and that they see it intimately connected to their professional life. It’s admittedly a small sample size and a group that chose to work in Catholic organizations, but for a sociologist such as myself it raises interesting questions about how the experience of engagement with religious ideas can vary even among people who solidly believe and belong.

While many reported in the pre-program survey that they had engaged in various forms of training and professional development in their careers, fewer had extended experiences where they had opportunities to learn about Catholic organizations outside of the sector in which they worked or opportunities to practice Catholic leadership using the tools of Catholic Social Teaching or methods such as communal discernment or in the Ignatian tradition an institutional or workplace examen. While we continue to assess the post-program data, the first cohort, and are interested in seeing if and how the experience of the program continues to shape work in the months and years after the program, there is much in our early experience that should give leaders of religious organizations hope about their ability to hire, retain, and grow future leaders– not just those who identify with their denomination and have a certain job title but those who can truly think with their organizations in ways that are an authentic lived expression of faith.

Our experience suggests that programs that have low barrier to entry (i.e. no cost to participants, flexible modality/timing of participation), opportunities to be in community with likeminded others, and that are experiential as opposed to theoretical will draw eager participants. Our participants ended the program by contributing both to their home organizations through their capstone projects (e.g. designing a year of Jubliee activities for a school board, developing a new teacher mentoring program, creating new mission-aligned program elements at a summer camp). They also ended the program, nearly universally offering to support “Cohort 2” however they could. That’s evidence that they might just be Catholic leaders, not just leaders who are Catholic.

What Leadership Programs Should DO:

• Think of the work of leadership development as more than just identifying the “faithful ones” who might do what they are asked. Leadership is less about who is qualified to lead and more about how those who have been called to lead engage with the work.
• Reduce the barriers to participation in leadership development by ensuring programs are low cost, flexible in modality, and offer choice in how to meet requirements in ways that meet people where they are.
• Emphasize experiential learning and learning in community in ways that allow individuals to learn both from those who hold similar roles at different organizations and from those who hold very different roles at similar organizations.

What Leadership Programs Should NOT DO:

• Assume that personal faith and how people go about their work as leaders are automatically linked just because they go to church each Sunday.
• Fear that programs without a lot of assigned reading mean that there isn’t any “real” learning.
• Forget to be grateful when organizations in your ecosystem invest in people.

Carol Ann MacGregor
Vice President Academic and Dean at St. Jerome’s University