By Jim Robbins
You likely heard President/CEO Paul Mulligan’s State of the Agency presentations for Catholic Charities earlier this year. Paul talked about several key organizational realignments taking place, with a start date of March 1.
One of those actions was to launch a new non-profit, Housing for Hope, dedicated to creating, expanding and managing our property-based asset portfolio for Catholic Charities. Housing for Hope is led by Executive Director Steve Capobres and has officially opened.
Within Housing for Hope falls another department called support operations. Support operations is led by myself, Jim Robbins. I have moved over from the administrative support group where I led IT, procurement and metro Phoenix facilities. These responsibilities will be changing, with a new focus on managing our agency’s full suite of properties (outside of the world of Head Start).
This includes nearly 200 properties in central and northern Arizona. Our relationship with these properties is highly varied, including ownership, leasing, offices and residences. Each relationship is a unique case study, with many differing stakeholders and challenges.
However, one constant is involved in all of them – they each have some sort of financial impact on our short and long-term organizational sustainability. The support operations group will be looking to optimize this financial impact, working with program teams for the best income stream, while closely managing expenses for the best possible net financial result.
Expense management takes many forms, but very important is maintenance. We want all of the properties we work with to be positive reflections of our approach to our clients, team members, funders and partners. Central and northern Arizona maintenance team members are becoming one team, with shared goals and support. We will also look to partner with external organizations who can help out during times of peak workload or special maintenance needs.
This is just a brief introduction to this new organization, which will be evolving over time as we become more deeply engaged in our new scope. Other key initiatives are expanding our coverage territory (for example expanding into Mohave County) and additional property units (Prescott is a key target). We look forward to working with our fellow team members in the program and administrative groups to achieve our important and shared objectives.
