September Pru Comm meeting

On September 20, we reconvened at full strength after the summer of much work done in smaller subgroups.

For the first 45 minutes of this month's meeting, Cindy Cordova shared with us her perspectives on the achievements of the Religious Education Futures Task Force's findings, and we pursued a very frank and open discussion of the contending visions, possibilities, and constraints that face our plans for how to move forward. We moved closer to a consensus that seeks to build up our church's ministry to families with children, which we are coming to understand as being a key to fulfilling our strategic vision for 2015. But the details of what RE will look like, and the optimal configuration of staffing to achieve these goals given our foreseeable financial resources, are issues that may need to be clarified in part by the talented group of individuals we intend to bring together and appoint to serve on the "search committee" a month from now.

Besides hearing updates and reports from all of the standing committees, and the Minister's report (which included a listing of Tom Schade's goals for this year), we acted on just one item this month. Lee Bona presented the revised wording of the church's investment guidelines, to be voted on for inclusion in the Financial Handbook (on behalf of the Trustees of Parish Funds: Diane Mandile, Lee Bona, and Jeanine Beratta). With one small emendation (the change of "shall" to "should" in the sentence referring to how amounts in our designated areas of restricted investments (gaming, alcohol, and tobacco) are to be kept below a maximum of 1% of our portfolio by our investment manager, Lee's motion was approved.