Catholic Charities In the News
Catholic Charities receives national accreditation
January 3, 2009 - The Clarion Herald
By Peter Finney, Jr.
It’s fair to say the quest by Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans to gain the cherished stamp of approval from the national Council on Accreditation began under a huge black cloud on the weekend of Hurricane Katrina.
That’s when the $600 check to begin the accreditation process literally flew out of the imploded 10th-floor office window of Aaron Portier, Catholic Charities’ director of planning and evaluation.
“I had the application check in an envelope on my desk, and then Katrina came and blew it out the window,” Portier said last week, reflecting on the ignominious start to the accreditation process. “It was nowhere to be found. I had decided not to mail the check on Friday and figured I would just send it on Monday morning. Of course, our universe changed that weekend.”
Rough start, great finish
In the end, the rough start yielded a fantastic result. Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans received word just before Christmas that its entire organization had become only the 12th entity in the entire state of Louisiana to be accredited by COA, which acknowledges that the organization’s work is based on “best-practice standards performed by a skilled staff providing the highest quality service at all levels of the organization.”
The accreditation culminated three years of work by Catholic Charities, Portier said, and it sets up an ongoing review process that will help the agency remain committed to service in fulfillment of its overall mission.
After Catholic Charities regrouped from the initial chaos of Katrina, Gordon Wadge and Jim Kelly, co-presidents and CEOs, made the decision in December 2005 to go ahead with the accreditation process because they believed it would help the organization assess its strengths and challenges, Portier said.
“We hoped and prayed we would be accredited, but we agreed that regardless of whether we got accredited or not we wanted to use these standards to help us take those next steps forward,” Portier said. “We wanted something that would help give us structure because funding was flying left and right for certain kinds of services. We don’t ever want to be in the position where we are jumping at a service simply because funding is available. It’s got to be about mission.”
Employment growing
Before Hurricane Katrina, Catholic Charities employed about 900 people who staffed dozens of programs that assist the poor and vulnerable of all faiths. Employment dipped to about 400 in the months after the storm when entire programs had to be canceled either because of lack of funding or because the client base for a specific program had not returned to the metropolitan area in sufficient numbers.
Portier said CCANO now employs about 685 people, and that number increases in the summer when the Summer Witness program for low-income youths is offered.
Because so many employees are new to the agency, knowledge of the organization’s mission is even more important.
“We’ve got less than 50 percent of our staff who have been with us three years or more,” Portier said. “Institutional knowledge, organizational behavior and the sense of mission and history in many ways had to be rebuilt.”
‘Best practices’
During the process, CCANO discovered that some of its programs were already shining examples of how to use “best practices.” For example, the new Family Justice Center that marshals resources under one roof for victims of domestic abuse has been cited as a premier program, as has the Independent Living Skills Program.
CCANO now has written guidelines to evaluate if a potential program fits within its mission or whether it should help outside agencies already working in a certain area better accomplish its task.
“Is there someone else in the community who is doing the work that we can support instead of us trying to do it independently?”Portier asked. “It’s a balancing act.”
Portier said he hopes the prestigious accreditation will reaffirm CCANO’s already respected name within the community.
“For our consumers we can comfortably say we are using the highest standards in our work,” Portier said. “These are not just the highest standards that we have determined are the highest standards, but they are nationally agreed upon standards.”
Portier said the sad reality is that since Katrina, Catholic Charities and other faith-based agencies have been stretched to the limit.
“Our clients keep coming and sometimes we can help and sometimes we can’t,” he said. “The needs remain tremendous with the escalation in the price of rental housing and utilities. If we had an unlimited amount of money, we could spend it. That’s frightening, but that’s the reality.”
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