On The Boundary
Are We All Vincentians Now?

By Jon Van Til

I recently had the honor of lecturing at DePaul University, and prepared myself to present a version of the “usual road talk” -- growing civil society, the need for all four sectors to work together, blurring of the sectors, and the like. On the plane out, however, I read through the materials I had been sent by my hosts, Patrick Murphy and Tamara Nezhina, colleagues in DePaul’s School of Public Service.

Among these materials was a special issue of a journal published at the university. The issue showcased a set of papers presented at a retreat conference in 2003, and I set about thumbing through the volume as the plane droned on. 

The first thing that struck me about the papers was that many of them were written by priests, and that’s not a profession that often finds its way onto my “must read” list. Even Patrick Murphy, the head of the school that would host me, was a priest (among other accomplishments, as well). So I started to read the paper by him, which bore the intriguing title, “We Want the Best.”

I was immediately struck, in perusing this paper, by the many familiar references that were made to a fellow called “Vincent.” That’s all, just “Vincent.” This authority turned out to be the university’s patron saint, Vincent DePaul. But he was almost never referred to as “Saint Vincent” or “Vincent DePaul” or even “DePaul” -- just “Vincent.” As I leafed through the rest of the paper, I discovered that the author was making a clear and powerful case for the persistent application of leadership in human affairs.

I leafed ahead in the volume and noticed a paper on Ireland, a part of the world I’ve tried to write about as well, and was struck by its title: “Sister Gen: A Case Study of Vincentian Leadership.” Apparently this was a more informal religious tradition than the staid Catholic parishes I remember from my childhood in Illinois and Tennessee. And this paper opened with an intriguing quote from an Irish politician to the effect that things are often “very well in practice,” but the real question involves how they “work in theory.”

And then I came across a third paper that quoted Vincent in its title. This one was written by the executive director of community and government relations at DePaul, and was titled “’There is Great Charity, But…” As I turned through this paper I came across a six-page section on the organization of charity in the 21st century that was as clear and crisp a description of the work of the third sector as I have ever read.

Now I was hooked. This intellectual tradition, new to me, contained real substance. These followers of Vincent knew where the nails were, and hit them square on the head.

I began to reorganize my thinking about the forthcoming talks. I knew I wanted to talk about the ways in which a diverse group of third sector leaders I had written about in Northern Ireland had approached their work. I planned to talk about Glen Barr, and the development of his public life from electrical worker to union leader to elected official to paramilitary commander to chief executive of Londonderry’s Ebrington Center. The center is a business-like third sector organization that serves its Protestant Unionist community with a restaurant, pub, community theater, and health club, among other facilities.

And, I wanted to talk about Paddy Doherty, and his journey from businessman to leader of the “Free Derry” insurrection to the rebuilder of his riot-torn city as the chief executive of Derry’s Inner City Trust. Finally, I planned to conclude with a discussion of the way in which Eamonn Deane quietly guides Derry’s Holywell Trust, a remarkable blend of cultural and social innovators from both sides of Derry’s walls.

But the question was how to bring the lessons together for a group of hard-working graduate students, especially in a session scheduled from 7:30 p.m. until 9 p.m. after they’d put in a full day at their various employed positions? My colleague Tamara Nezhina had asked them to read from my Growing Civil Society as a basic text for her course. I wanted the students to see that the field of nonprofit organization research was one that welcomed contributions from students and practitioners, as well as academics.

I began by projecting a representation of productive civil society on the screen -- it had been developed by my students in a seminar last summer at the University of Colorado. It depicted a figure with a head for business, two arms willing to make the work happen as volunteers or paid staff, two legs to keep the plan in motion, and a large heart at the center, representing the mission of the organization.

As I described this figure, it began to dawn on me that I was talking about none other than Vincent himself. I recounted to the students the way Patrick Murphy concluded his article in the Vincentian conclusion, deriving a list of “Lessons for Leaders” he drew from Vincent’s career as a pioneering nonprofit executive in 17th century France:

Move over, Peter Drucker, John Carver, Joel Orosz -- Vincent figured out the tricks of the trade nearly 400 years ago. Now it’s up to us to put that wisdom to work.

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Jon Van Til teaches Urban Studies at Rutgers University, Camden. Among the four authored or co-edited books emerging in 2008 under his name is a paperback edition of Growing Civil Society (Indiana University Press). The journal to which he refers is Vincentian Heritage (2005).