The search for our new Executive Director is underway. We hope to have our new director begin in July. The official posting has been sent to all our member congregations as well as to the Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities, NCR, Secular Franciscans, Franciscan School of Theology, FAN, Franciscan Mission Service, Franciscan Institute, and others. Click here to view the posting.

Requests for the application are being received by the search committee (Fr. Brian Terry, Chair, Kathleen Flanagan, Sisters Nancy Schreck, Linda Wieser, Kathy Dougherty). After reviewing the applications and qualified candidates are surfaced, interviews will be conducted. We have great hopes for having a person identified before AFC (June 3-6). However, if that is not the case, we will keep the search active until the preferred candidate is identified. Please help us by sharing the job description with other persons and organizations. In order to open our search to a broader audience of candidates, the Commission of Elected Leaders (CEL) voted to adapt the by-laws to read: The Executive Director will be selected from qualified candidates. She/He need not be a professed Third Order Regular Franciscan . . . (Article 17)

During the past month, we have continued to work on proposals for changes to the various commissions/committees. Our focus has been on Commission of Charism Services, Commission of Elected Leaders, Commission of Regions and the Peace and Justice and Finance Committees.

At this point we are planning to hold consultations with members throughout March on the commission proposals. In April we will hold open consultations on the full slate of proposals for all members to review and comment. Needless to say, designing the method to collect the input and managing multiple zoom sessions in coming weeks will keep us very busy.

We did hold a consultation with the CEL to facilitate a by-laws change that would allow us to recruit a new executive director who is not a vowed TOR member.

We believe that we can complete the plan for revision of commissions by the June assembly. We will begin to outline steps for board re-structuring. At this point, we believe that should follow the assembly and be tied to the start of a new executive director’s term.

We also are working on general considerations that are part of our realization that certain customs or practices need to change in order to make sure that the work loads of volunteers for committees and the board are reasonable. One of these items is the realization that we do not have a working definition for the difference between a commission and a committee. For that reason, we will probably be advocating some changes that clear this up.

Questions about by-laws changes come up often. It will be our recommendation that we postpone by-laws revision until we have worked out all the new structural changes and approved them. In this way a revision can be done with all the new plans available to the group charged to do this work. This prevents us from having to make changes constantly but when there is a question of necessity, the board will be able to convene the CEL as it did last month to address the need. We believe that the board and new executive director can be entrusted with sufficient authority to make provisional changes in coming months and to prevent a continual need for emergency meetings for formal by-law revision. Our learnings in this process lead us to believe that a major overhaul of the by-laws will be in order and should be a task undertaken with canonical and civil law expertise.