Mission Activities Team Shares Challenges and Aligns Goals

The Loretto Mission Activities Team represents the Community committees, networks and some offices. They met at the Motherhouse to share their work and develop strategies to do it better. They reviewed Loretto’s five-year goals and recent Assembly resolutions on immigration and sustainability.

Representatives of the Pakistan, Guatemala, Peace and Latin America/Caribbean committees, the Earth and Women’s networks, Loretto at the U.N., the Loretto Volunteer Program, Loretto Link and the Earth Education and Advocacy Coordinator, Outreach Coordinator and Mission Activities Coordinator participated in the meeting July 29–Aug. 1.

One agreement reached at the meeting:  All of the groups represented will, going forward, plan and consider their work in relation to Loretto’s immigration and sustainability priorities.

At the 2018 Assembly, the Community adopted five-year goals.  Here is how the Mission Activities Team is aligning its work with these goals, which are summarized here:

 1.   Articulate priorities for Loretto life and mission based on the Gospel. The two priority areas for our work will be immigration and sustainability.

2.   Support inclusion of many persons, members and others, to carry forward the charism and mission of Loretto. In doing our work, we will find ways for all of Loretto to participate; we will invite others to join with us; we will collaborate with other groups where we can add value to their efforts or they add value to ours.

3.   Explore and apply Gospel values. This, and doing our work in spiritual community, is the foundation of mission activity in Loretto.

4.   Build on and encourage mission work and ministries through active participation, human and financial resources, collaboration with others, careful planning and prayerful support.

We agreed to improvements in our work together to strengthen our alignment with this goal. Specifically, every mission-related work will, to the fullest extent possible, include ways for every member of the Community who wishes to participate. We are improving our internal collaboration to strengthen accomplishments and effectiveness. We have created new collaborative planning tools. We are committed to holding one another accountable to our agreements about process improvement.

5.   Enhancement of the lives of all members. By inviting every member of Loretto into the mission work and providing opportunities to work as one, we hope to strengthen the bonds of community and enhance the lives of all members.

We spent considerable time discussing our current structure and decided, for the time being, to maintain it. We recognize that, over many decades, committees and networks have done an incredible amount of work. We also acknowledge that every committee and network feels stretched as our numbers decline while the work remains. We agreed that much closer collaboration, agreement to focus all work through the lens of our Community’s two priority concerns and better efforts to identify opportunities for Community engagement in the work are process improvements. We hope they will alleviate stresses while better aligning Mission Activities with our five-year goals.

We express our profound gratitude to Loretto for continued fidelity to our belief that “Community in this Present Time is for Mission.” Members of Mission Activities at the meeting were Leslee Moore, Pat Geier, Karel Disponett, Sally Dunne,  Mary Nelson, Beth Blissman, Kim Klein, Jessie Rathburn, Sandra Hareld and I.