Thursday March 19th at 6pm we will be screening the new documentary of Adam Smith at Heider College of Business. All are welcome! The director, Jon Cipiti will be joining us, as will Bruce Shaw of Georgetown University who helped bring about the creation of the film. See the trailer here.
We had the pleasure and good fortune to interview Emery Koenig, former vice chairman and chief risk officer at Cargil, about his 37 year career at Cargil and his 47 years commitment as a married member of the Focolare spiritual movement. His personal faith values have deeply impacted how he thinks about business, and he was able to share countless interesting stories of how he lived out his faith and commitment to Focolare spirituality in his business life. It was a fantastic time, and we got nearly 8 hours of footage with him while visiting Ave Maria near Naples.
Andy Gustafson got to go visit 5 classes in the business school at Ave Maria University in South Florida near Naples mid-February. It was a great opportunity to get to share about the Economy of Communion vision of business, and how business need not be a soul-sucking endeavor, as well as sharing about the Economy of Communion Project (funded by the John Templeton Foundation). Ave Maria is an amazing place. It was just open fields just over 20 years ago, and now there is a whole campus and sizable town with a gorgeous church in its center.
This is a half-hour interview from November. It was great to get to engage with and Mariella and Gabor. They were great! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmbjHX6E958
The Economy of Communion Project continued our series of interviews, the third being John Mundell, president and founder of Mundell and Associates in Indianapolis, an environmental consulting company. With a background in civil and geotechnical engineering, John has spent 45 years running his business according to Economy of Communion Values. He had numerous stories, and provided some rich material in 15 hours of video footage we took while he was here! Our interns also enjoyed getting to know him and found his work inspirational. Snippets and case studies from his interview (and all the interviews) will soon be available on our site at https://www.economyofcommunion.org/
The EoC Project welcomed Paul Catipon, CEO of NetPro in New York City to Creighton October 20-22nd to be interviewed as one of the eight Economy of Communion Entrepreneurs to be interviewed this Fall. He has powerful stories of how he built up a company through incredible generosity and open-handedness to friends and competitors. His success story is truly inspiring and will provide a lot of great snippets for use in classroom discussion as the EoC project develops course curriculum for its website.
8 Entrepreneurs will be interviewed this fall, and another 4-6 this spring, all sharing stories of putting people first and living out their values of love and unity first, with profits being a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for running a business.
For more on the EoC Project, or to sign up for updates, please check out https://www.economyofcommunion.org/
Andy Gustafson, director of the BFCGI, is going to do three presentations at Providence College October 17th. He will do a morning coffee table event with selected business students, meet with faculty from the business school to discuss Jesuit Catholic Business School education for lunch, and do a public talk on How Business Can Make You a Better Human Being.
Andy Gustafson, director of the BFCGI, presented at the recent CBFA annual conference at Lee University in Cleveland, TN. His talk was about how Protestant business faculty can utilize Catholic influenced teachings on business, otherwise known at Catholic Social Thought. His talk was generally well received and he is grateful for the opportunity to present and engage the CBFA members.
Joan Duggen was quite successful in business, made a lot of money, and then began an Economy of Communion company which she helped co-run for 22 years, tutoring students. She has an inspiring story and the Economy of Communion Project was fortunate to be able to interview her for 2 days at Creighton in early October. She is the first of more than 12 EoC entrepreneurs who we will be interviewing in the next few months.
The Business, Faith and Common Good Institute has been awarded a 1.2 Million dollar grant for the Economy of Communion Project– an effort housed in the Heider College of Business at Creighton University to promote the Economy of Communion Movement by creating content and materials for professors to use in the classroom, and for students and business people to use to learn more about an Economy of Communion approach to business practices.
Creighton will be providing infrastructure and support for the project. Staffing which is funded by the grant will include the director (Andy Gustafson), associate director, an assistant director, and at least 2 interns, employed by Creighton but funded through the grant. Aspects of the project include a symposium event the 2nd year which will bring noted scholars to Creighton to present papers which will be published in a book. The project involved also doing extensive interviews with at least 12 entrepreneurs. The footage from those interviews will serve both as a basis for an edited-down 1 hour video, as well as snippets which will be paired with case studies on various EoC examples of how to treat customers, employees, competitors, how to approach marketing, economics, entrepreneurship, leadership, etc with EoC values. Also short essays will be commissioned from various professors, teachers and experts to give brief overviews of focused topics such as “an EoC Approach to HR, with examples” and “How an EoC approach to Economics differs from traditional Economics” and other similar essays for classroom and lay use. Finally, we also will be putting together an EoC course which will be available for free to any university who may want to use it. So many classroom-friendly deliverables will result from the project. The materials are aimed at those who participate in business generally, not just those who own businesses of their own. More can be seen on our website at the EOC Project page.
Business, Faith, and the Common Good Institute 