What's Happening

October 10, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – The Adrian Dominican Sisters Portfolio Advisory Board (PAB) held its annual meeting during the last week of September and shared the fruits of that meeting in a September 27, 2024, Fireside Chat in the Weber Center Auditorium.

After the Board and staff members introduced themselves, Cynthia Crim, PAB Chair since 2022, offered an update. The Board approved five loans to community organizations. The Board’s greatest accomplishment during the meeting, however, was adopting the 2023-2028 Strategic Plan, which had been approved last year by the PAB and the General Council. “More than anything, we spent a lot of time listening to each other and really studying and making sure the plan embodied all of the Enactments,” particularly diversity, gender equity, and environmental sustainability, Cynthia reported.

Details on the Strategic Plan and on the five organizations whose loans were approved will be included in upcoming PAB articles published on the Adrian Dominican Sisters public website.

Cynthia also announced the Vision and Mission of the PAB, crafted during the meeting:

Vision
Rooted in the Vision, Mission, and Enactments of the Adrian Dominican Sisters, the Portfolio Advisory Board envisions a beloved community without poverty, hunger, homelessness, and ecological degradation. The beloved community is shaped by its collective voices and is committed to promoting racial and gender equity and systemic changes to policies and practices of institutions inhibiting its realization. Building on its collaborative strength, the beloved community is an active, healthy, and thriving space where all are welcome and have a voice.

Mission
The Mission of the Portfolio Advisory Board is to use the assets of the Adrian Dominican Sisters to build the beloved community. We invest in community organizations that create opportunities for those who are marginalized and that embody values of collaboration, inclusiveness, right relationship with Earth, and racial and gender equity. We use our voice as shareholders in corporations to promote policies and practices that build the beloved community.

Marilín Llanes, OP, PAB Director and Portfolio Manager, announced the upcoming 50th anniversary celebration of PAB, Building on Legacy, Impacting the Future, set for Friday, September 26, 2025, at Weber Center. The celebration will include a video telling the story of PAB through the voices of 13 Sisters, Associates, and lay members of the Board. Details are forthcoming.

Sister Marilín also encouraged Sisters and Associates to check out the refreshed PAB page of the Congregation’s public website, which features pictures and articles depicting the work and partners of the PAB. Articles focus alternatively on corporate responsibility efforts and community investments.

For the remainder of the Fireside Chat, Eric K. Foster, Co-Founder, Chair, and Managing Director of Rende Progress Capital, spoke of his work offering loans and other financial services to businesses owned by people of color. Rende has been part of the PAB’s portfolio since 2020, Sister Marilín said. “We were very taken by [Rende’s] whole mission and vision because it was so aligned with our values.” 

Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rende has 47 loan customers, Eric said. Those clients “represent statistically having higher loan denials than their white peer business owners,” he explained. “In credit, they have had similar credit worthiness to white businesses, but in our landscape in Western Michigan, they cannot get a bank loan.” Of his clients, he said, 70% never received a loan before Rende took them on.

Eric emphasized the impact that loans have on the lives of the entrepreneurs of color and the people they serve. One company, Reliable Medical Transport, offers rides to vulnerable people with mobility problems for non-emergency medical appointments as well as non-medical activities. With loans, Reliable Medical Transport and other businesses have been able to expand, increase their revenue, and pay higher wages to their employees, he said. 

Eric thanked the PAB for the loan that he had received from them, enabling him in return to offer loans to entrepreneurs of color. He also encouraged them to stand strong in the face of a movement of “aggrieved white people who fought back against affirmative action,” which has persuaded some corporations to stop funding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. Many companies are “under pressure from those who tell them that it’s wrong to promote racial justice,” Eric said. But as a 501(c)3 organization, he added, the PAB has the right to offer grants and investments to people of color and other marginalized groups. “Don’t stop it,” he said. “Don’t cave in.”

View the entire Fireside Chat below or in our public video library.

Caption for the feature photo at top: Members of the Portfolio Advisory Board (PAB) during their September 2024 meeting are, from left, Carla Manning; Mary Ellen Leciejewski, OP; Marilin Llanes, OP, Director and Portfolio Manager; Bibiana “Bless” Colasito, OP, General Council Liaison; Sidney Williams, Jr., in back; Judy Byron, OP; Kris Cooper, Office Manager; Joseph Barker II; and Cynthia Crim, Chair. Not pictured are Carmen Mora, Vice Chair, and Mary Minette, Mercy Investment Consultant.

October 10, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – About 47 people – Adrian Dominican Associates and a few Sisters – attended the first in-person Associate Life retreat in years at Weber Retreat and Conference Center. 

Adrian Dominican Associates are women and men at least 18 years of age who make a non-vowed commitment to partner with the Adrian Dominican Sisters and to live out their call to the Dominican Charism. While maintaining their own lifestyles and financial independence, they participate in various spiritual, social, and ministerial experiences with the Sisters. 

The retreat focused on the new cosmology – or the new understanding of the universe – and the Dominican Charism. Prioress Elise D. García, OP, broke open the theme on the evening of October 4, 2024, as she welcomed the Associates and spoke of how her spirituality has been shaped by insights from the new cosmology. The vastness of the universe “expands the horizons of my inner landscape, my spiritual landscape,” she said. 

These insights have caused writers and theologians since the late 20th Century to “revisit assumptions derived from a 300-year-old view of the universe as a static, hierarchically organized universe,” Sister Elise said. Many people now, she said, have come to see the “deep interconnectedness of all life and understanding our place in the universe as a self-aware, conscious species.” 

The Dominican Charism “deeply grounds us into the search [for truth] and into what we’re learning,” Sister Elise said. “We take this learning from study and we integrate it into our prayer, into our hearts, into our Spirit-filled acts. All of those elements of the Dominican Charism fit well with the new cosmology.”  

The Dominican Charism was again the focus on Saturday, October 5, when the retreat participants gathered for a reflection by Associate Nancy Mason Bordley, Director of the Adrian Dominican Sisters Office of Dominican Charism. She compared the Dominican family to a family kitchen or dining room table. 

“There’s room for everyone,” Nancy said, adding that this Dominican table is held up by the four Dominican values – or pillars – of study, community, prayer, and ministry. “I like to think of the four legs holding up and supporting the holy preaching,” a distinct call of members of the Dominican family. “We preach from the pulpit of our lives. We use our individual gifts to meet the needs of the world around us.”

Nancy also emphasized the wider role of Dominicans as followers of Jesus. “As Dominicans, we’re people of Christ’s table,” she said. “Christ’s table is open, inclusive, uniting, invitational, and always diverse. Making room at the table is an ongoing mission for all people of God.”

Finally, Nancy issued a challenge to the participants to take up their individual roles in the Dominican family while facing the changes that will take place in the future – for both the Dominican Sisters and the Associates. “Each person in this room has received a very specific and sacred call from God,” she said. “Each of us is called to the charism and to promote our beautiful Dominican future.”

The afternoon session included a discussion by Patricia Siemen, OP, on the call of the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ General Chapter 2022 Spiritualty Enactment to attend to “the evolutionary awakening of human consciousness.” Scientific studies show that humanity is a species with self-conscious awareness, she said. “Some quantum physicists say now that the fundamental reality of the universe may indeed be consciousness – a consciousness that is embedded in matter and energy.”

Sister Patricia said that keeping this consciousness alive requires “a daily practice of silence, of engagement in contemplative practice and a mindfulness practice that helps us to stay in touch.” 

This consciousness has shifted her spirituality and understanding of God, who is present in this transformational consciousness. “Acknowledging the presence of a God who moves before us and yet the call to an ever-loving consciousness is the one thing that seems certain,” Sister Patricia said. “It’s the call of our soul to awaken to the sense of Holy Mystery, whose desire is to call us into ever-deepening relationship.” 

Esther Kennedy, OP, followed up with a presentation on mindfulness and the transformation of human consciousness. She described her own journey toward consciousness and mindfulness, which began when, as a chaplain at County Hospital in Chicago, she realized that she needed to come to grips with the suffering she witnessed in patients and their families. The only book on suffering that she could find was a handbook written by Buddha for his followers. “It was an opening to consciousness in how to deal with my life and to find my place in it,” she said. 

Pointing to the great need for the transformation of human consciousness and the practice of mindfulness, Sister Esther quoted Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now: “The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury… but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself. At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating.”

Sister Esther pointed with hope to the “millions of small groups” who gather in service to the world through their transformed consciousness. While the world situation is awful in places of war and strife, “there are millions of people right now in service who are waking up to the goodness inside.”

The final day of the retreat offered the Associates one final time to gather and to share their insights from the weekend. The Associates concluded their time together by attending Mass at St. Catherine Chapel with the Motherhouse community.

For information on becoming an Adrian Dominican Associate, contact Associate Nancy Mason Bordley at 517-266-3534 or [email protected].  

 

Caption for above photo: Participants in the Associate Life Retreat take time out for a group photo.