By Erika M. Hollis
Service of others rarely happens in a sanitary, secure, and sheltered environment—and thus Jesuit, Catholic enterprises have always had to pay attention to issues of risk. The early Jesuits’ missions took them to places of great unrest, human rights violations, and disease—like the Canadian Martyrs or Peter Claver, S.J., who ministered to slaves in the New World. The Jesuits have always done this work because they go where God needs them.
Contemporary risk management practices inherently include many Jesuit, Catholic values and principles. The University Risk Management & Insurance Association defines risk management as “the continuous process to identify, assess and prioritize risks in an effort to control, avoid, minimize or eliminate the effects of risk on an organization’s assets.” A university’s assets include facilities, technology, finances, people (faculty, staff and students), reputation and mission.
Importantly, the definition of risk management does not include risk elimination. In fact, attempts to eliminate all risk could risk eliminating the very mission of a Jesuit, Catholic enterprise.
Risk management serves the core mission of educating our students while protecting our assets. At a Jesuit university, student immersions are sometimes risky, but they are also at the heart of our mission, one that is often the result of discernment that led a program director to identify where God needs the school and students to serve.
A real-world example: A health program offers an opportunity for students to perform clinical work in a developing country. The faculty member’s program goals include critical clinical experiences and students witnessing and serving those who lack contemporary medical practices. The faculty member is also working to create an experience that puts into action many Jesuit values — chief among them, sending men and women to be in service of others and opportunities to model the work of contemplatives in action. Risk managers will see in the proposed program the good — and the risk. The risk managers will worry about the unrest in the neighboring country, the un-vetted travel excursions for the students with uninsured operators, vaccinations for all participants, giardia in the water sources, and concern that the spouse and children of the faculty member traveling with the group create additional risk for the university.
The role of risk management and the general counsel’s office is to both recognize the call of our mission and the reality of how things might go wrong, to better ensure that the program can achieve the desired goals. Common tools in such work include insurance to mitigate unknown risks like local unrest and to ensure that program participants can be removed quickly in the event of a civil disruption, waivers to ensure that the actual risk to the university’s assets is limited and training for faculty on the trip to ensure they know what to do if participants are harmed. Another tool is a requirement that a group must have two vetted and unrelated faculty or chaperones on a trip so participants always have a chaperone.
In many ways, risk management work is a truly Jesuit enterprise. It requires an organization to be aware of what it wants to achieve with a particular activity, how the activity uses the organization’s strengths, and how that work fits the mission.
A key risk management and emergency management tool for identifying strengths and weakness is a tabletop exercise that presents a simulated emergency situation to a group of institutional leaders. Participants review the roles they would play and the work they would do in that emergency and conduct a post-incident evaluation. That evaluation is intended to identify what worked, what didn’t, and what was forgotten.
These tabletop exercises are secular, but they lend themselves to an adaptation of the Jesuit traditions of an examen. It is a method for identifying the weaknesses of an organization so the organization can plug holes, be stronger and, thus, more resilient. At a Jesuit enterprise, the post-incident evaluation also properly includes an evaluation of where the organization acted in accordance with its mission and where its values were tested.
Construction workers make progress on the expansion of DeSmet Residence Hall at Regis University. The $20.5 million renovation will add 104 new beds, student lounges, classrooms, and an elevator. Photo courtesy of Regis University.
For example, in an emergency, Regis University recognizes that it may be a refuge for the surrounding community and could be called upon to provide food, shelter and services to our university community and neighbors. In addition, our Rueckert-Hartman College of Health Professions has identified and trained clinicians and students we will call upon to provide medical care for the university community and the surrounding area. Our tabletop exercises helped us identify this reality and, as a result, we have a dedicated medical health professional to act as the chief medical officer in our emergency management plan.
An institution that routinely evaluates and recognizes its strengths and weaknesses is better able to mitigate and prepare for challenges— which no organization can avoid entirely. This work of cura apostolica serves God’s greater mission.
Erika M. Hollis is vice president and general counsel at Regis University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Regis University.