A Summary of Our Experience

Our decision to hold a Catholic Charities USA Regional Training in March 2006 came about because we were looking for a way to build greater understanding of Parish Social Ministry. Every year, we hold a “Call to Justice Conference” to gather parish social justice ministry leaders. Last year Tom Ulrich, now with Catholic Relief Services, was our keynote speaker. Participants were enthusiastic but expressed a desire to go deeper. In talking with Rachel Lustig of CCUSA, Lucio Caruso and Jim Rademaker of our office made the decision to try a Regional Training and to invite nearly dioceses to join with us.

In the end we had strong support from the Diocese of Kalamazoo (to the south of us) and a few attendees from the Archdiocese of Detroit (at a greater distance), while some people from the Diocese of Lansing participated on their own. Leaders developed an outline for the Training via teleconference with Rachel’s assistance. Everyone assumed responsibility for some aspect of the weekend. As the host diocese, we created a brochure with a map and registration form, made arrangements with a local hotel for a block of rooms to be set aside, and took registrations. Each diocese was responsible for publicizing the event to its own people. CCUSA shipped us the folders for the participants, and we inserted one flyer from each diocese. We also created the name tags and programs for the closing liturgy.

Our Training was held at Dominican Center-Marywood, a meeting facility run by the Grand Rapids Dominicans. Their food service took care of hospitality and meals. Their staff also helped with room set-up and audio-visual equipment.

We had about 155 participants, 114 of whom were from our Diocese. We encouraged parishes to send teams and several parishes did. The quality of participation was high. Evaluations were very positive. One measure of success was that, in April, we had a capacity crowd for an awards dinner—the awards having been given at the Call to Justice Conference in previous years.

We think we owe the success of this Training to good publicity and the relationships that have been built between the diocesan Social Justice office and our parishes. Over the past few years we have identified key PSM contacts for most of our parishes. We have also been publishing a bimonthly newsletter which highlights parish activities. For the past four years several of our parishes have offered JustFaith, an in-depth formation program in social justice, and by now we have built up a strong core of JF graduates. Out of the 114 from our Diocese who attended the Training, 42 (about 38%) were either JF graduates or this year’s participants. We have a lot of folks excited about social justice here!

A Summary of Our Experience

The Catholic Charities Regional Training is an excellent tool in recruiting parishioners for parish social ministry. It is an easy process with great help from Catholic Charities USA.

The first step is to fill out the Catholic Charities USA application for a regional training. Shortly after you send in the application, Catholic Charities USA contacts you to start the process of planning the training. Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) is with you every step of the way. They plan the first meeting with your interests on what you want the training to accomplish. After the first meeting where a representative from CCUSA actually comes to you and helps you come up with goals.

All meetings are then by telephone where agenda, speakers, accommodations, etc. are flushed out over the next few months. A time table is set up and jobs delegated to members of the committee – agenda, finding speakers, location for training, food, length of training, fees, sleeping accommodations, registration, turn out, set-up, take down and publicity. Most communication is by email and telephone. With email, the process becomes pretty easy.

When the day arrives all of the committee has jobs assigned to them. CCUSA sends packets with information for each of the participants and local information can be added. Pictures were taken with a digital camera so that we could use in a newsletter. Also we taped the main speakers.

One thing we did was enlist a fair trade coffee company to have a table with information and they supplied the coffee and made the coffee for the whole weekend. Hopefully, it was beneficial to the coffee company also.

We had over 100 people attend a Friday night, Saturday all day and Sunday morning training. It was a great inspiring event that we hope to build social ministry on in the archdiocese.