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Home > A conversation with > Article
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League values 'centred firmly in the Gospel'
A conversation with Dr MAUREEN CLEARY, Catholic Women’s leadership consultant
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| 6 April, 2008 |
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| COMPASSIONATE: Leadership consultant Dr Maureen Cleary believes the Catholic Women’s League has a ‘very earthy understanding of needs’. |
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The Catholic Women’s League is running a Catholic Women’s Leadership Development Project, featuring workshops, scholarships and mentoring linking women with the resources they require for leadership development. The next workshop is in Newcastle on May 31. Participants can apply for four scholarships each to the value of $1500 for a course or program they believe will assist their leadership development. Successful scholarship applicants will also be offered a mentor to support and encourage them. A key consultant to the project is Dr Maureen Cleary, a specialist in non-profit agencies providing education, welfare and health services. She is an authority on the management and governance dilemmas that occur in Australia’s Catholic human service organisations, arising from external economic and political factors and rapid change in their operation areas. The founder of the Nonprofit Governance & Management Centre she works extensively with religious organisations in Australia and overseas. In a conversation with Brian Davies she discussed the CWL’s women’s leadership project.
Q What is it, Maureen Cleary, that differentiates a Catholic women’s leadership development from other women’s leadership?
I think it’s probably the values base. Most women’s organisations have a values base, based on values that have been articulated by a particular group of women and often I think exactly the same. The Catholic Women’s League (CWL) has a set of values articulated throughout its history and those values are contributing to their program for leadership development for women but as well I think the values base of religious organisations all have values centred very firmly in the Gospel.
Q Whereas other values, general society’s values, are different?
They can be exactly the same but what’s different is the motivation for expressing and promoting them. I’ve worked with lots of women groups and frequently you are talking the same values, often exactly the same, but they’re just coming at it from a different motivation.
Q And a different emphasis?
That’s one of the things that strikes me most about the CWL, that they’re really grounded in a very earthy understanding of needs, very compassionate, an approach to service both practical and compassionate. When you come into their offices there are bags and bags of quilts that have been made or squares that have been knitted. I can remember the league buying the first small radios with earphones for HIV/AIDS patients in the Sacred Heart Hospice; it’s that very practical recognition of needs and responding to them very quickly, practically.
Q When you’re called in to consult on dilemmas, problems, is it too simple an idea that you see immediately where management’s getting it wrong or recognise familiar weaknesses?
My work’s not with management but with the board. The ones that call you in are those who want to do something, usually providing them with some training or about how they can do their role more efficiently, more effectively. Or sometimes you get called in because of conflict between the board and management because they haven’t spelt out clearly enough what the board’s role is and what’s management’s and where the boundaries are or sometimes for development or fixing a specific problem. We go in and evaluate the board, at their request, and there’s no one constant thing ... every single board is different. There’s no ‘one size fits all’.
Q So what are the dilemmas – and how do you deal with them, as set out for example in your recent book Management Dilemmas in Catholic Human Service?
I suppose the fundamental dilemma common to most Catholic providers is this: how can they still procure mission and a purpose decided by diocesan clergy or a bishop or religious institute and founded by clergy and religious from a particular period of history, a particular training and a particular formation ... so their values and philosophy are embedded “in the woodwork” as it were. Yet, certainly since the 1960s, the people now providing the services are probably lay people, possibly still under diocesan or religious institute sponsorship, but you’ve got an intrinsic change in the people. So, a dilemma: how can meaning be developed in these organisations when they’ve undergone intrinsic change.
Q ‘Meaning’ meaning what?
It’s what I call ‘the meaning system’. I use the phrase because other words are inadequate. Sometimes you’ll hear it called mission, sometimes you’ll hear it called philosophy, sometimes values, sometimes culture: a raft of words. So I call it a meaning system and ask how you can knowingly construct it so that the meaning continues. In the past, clergy and members of religious institutes didn’t have to intentionally create that meaning because it was part of their lives, of what they did; their lives and their work were one. Society was largely supportive of what they did. Religion had a place in that society that it doesn’t any longer have, so we’re dealing with change at all sorts of levels. My work has been: How do you keep constructing meaning intentionally? It won’t ever be the original meaning but how do you identify what is in the meaning system that you want to keep going forward and how you actually do it and know the things to make sure it does.
Q So in that regard, what do you say to the Catholic Women’s League?
The Catholic Women’s League asked me to come and assist them at a time when certain characteristics of the league were concerning them about the long-term viability of the league, such as ageing members, a declining revenue base and very few young women coming into membership. At the time I came to them I’d been working with a number of religious institutions in their restructuring of their institutions.
Q You’re talking about nuns and brothers ...
.... and priests. So my message to them has been the one thing I’ve learnt through religious congregations restructuring was the need for a willingness to change the structure, to be flexible and a willingness to re-interpret their mission and their place in the world and be creative to help that happen. One of the things that struck me about the CWL was what a complicated structure they have, and a strict sort of structure – not unusual, common to many of these traditional voluntary organisations over the years. So it strikes me the CWL structure hasn’t changed that much in all that time.
Q And you’re recommending they gradually do so?
Yes – that’s been my recommendation, because like other membership-based organisations it has to have, in order to survive, some very clear changes that send some very clear messages to the younger generation.
Q That central phrase ‘linking women with ‘resources’: What sort of resources do they need in terms of leadership, is it different from that of other women?
One of the things the CWL has done is to secure solid resources to encourage younger women into the program and to identify leadership courses or programs that they think will help them in some way – it could be a mother running the parents and friends at the local primary school – exercise leadership all the time, of their family, their local community; in a variety of ways. Some might need some help in how to run a meeting, how to best do some skill; so what this course says is we’ve got the scholarships for you; you go and find your course and bring it back to us, in itself a leadership development. Applicants have to say this is what I want to do and why.
Q And as a career stepping stone?
An amazing things about women’s careers is they don’t go in straight lines as men’s careers do. Women’s careers go in and out the events of their lives. Women who already had a profession had first to rear children; other child-carers started assisting in the local P and C or some other thing. Then there are women who all of a sudden find themselves in leadership role, maybe running the little athletics club. All require some sort of leadership skill. You’d be hoping that by coming under the auspices of the CWL you would be promoting leadership based on the values of the CWL – leadership done in a particular way.
Q A personal question – what connections are there between your childhood and upbringing and your adult profession?
The most significant thing in my life was my parents, Catholic parents of the Depression. They left school early and they insisted their children had to be educated and there should be further education. I had two older brothers – I’m the youngest and only girl – and it was many years before I realised my parents were quite unusual in that they made no distinction between the boys and myself; at a time when the expectation of the girls I went to school with was that they would leave school at the intermediate certificate. The second significant thing was my father as a great communicator and my mother as an avid reader and a learner and so over the diner table he would always want to know what we had learnt that day and it would become a sort of conversation and I think was where my articulate nature came from. The other thing I thank them for were they were both deeply spiritual without being pious and they actually brought us up critiquing the Church. They were deeply committed to church – they were both in various sodalities like the Sacred Heart, St Vincent de Paul Society and the Holy Name Society – all of those things; but we always understood the Church and its people were not perfect ...
Q Where was your childhood?
Watson’s Bay – my grandparents were the first couple married in Watson’s Bay church – Our Lady Star of the Sea. And my grandmother told me the carpenters had to stop hammering so they could pronounce their vows. They are the first ones in the register there. My father and mother were married and worked there. And we were all born there. We had three generations of Whelans in Watson’s Bay. It was a little village – at the end of the tramline. Eventually we moved – went to Earlwood and probably the next most significant thing was Bethlehem College at Ashfield – more sacrifices on Mum and Dad’s part to enrol me there. The Sisters of Charity had such a focus on leadership development. They probably didn’t use those words in those days, but we firmly knew the idea was we were to be leaders of the future. So that was another very significant influence.
For Catholic Women’s Leadership Development Project information call Catherine McGrath on 0407 419 500, email jpcvmcgrath@bigpond.com
or call the Catholic Women’s League on (02) 9390 5153.
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