The purpose of Jesuit Networking

So, may Fr General and the Jesuits forgive us if we now start making a bit of noise in order to better catalyze the network into action.
I am going to continue with a silly comparison: there are about 800,000 Android apps. Anyone can access them; everyone can find them; if a new one comes along and it is really imaginative and excellent, it will soon attract funders and venture capitalists who will help it grow quickly.
But what about our Hombres y mujeres para los demás apps? We have some terrible problems and inefficiencies: for one thing, we don’t even know our own apps. I can promise you that the majority of faculty in Jesuit universities in the United States have never even heard of Fe y Alegria. And there is no platform where we can find all our Jesuit apps. So think of the inefficiencies. Right now, someone in Africa is trying to create a new kind of spiritual retreat for young adults, and so is someone in the United States: but the two of them don’t know about each other and therefore are completely duplicating effort. There is someone who wants to teach a seminar on poverty, and there is a beautiful poverty curriculum that some Jesuit university here in Latin America would be happy to share, but there is no way to connect the need to the resource. There is some Jesuit in India who has pioneered a very effective program for training community leaders, and many of us graduates would be happy to donate money so that this Jesuit can scale up his program quickly, but we will never hear about it, and he will suffer from resource deprivation.
So what should we do to help this network really become a network? I have no better ideas than anyone else, but in the interest of spurring our imagination, let me make ten suggestions of possible ways we could jump start ourselves. And almost every idea I mention below could also be launched at a purely local level; so if we cannot catalyze global buy-in, we can get started in any individual city:

• We could sponsor a global day of service and reflection, where graduates of traditional schools, Fe y alegría schools, refugees, parish members, etc, all working together to build our common Jesuit identity and network in our city, as a symbol of who we are and what we care about.

• Sponsor a networking series or lecture in our city, once every month, with those in the Jesuit network as our primary target audience.

• Create a multinational Jesuit student/alumni advocacy or study group on some global issue, like poverty, hunger, or water. We could all read the same book, or encyclical, or letter from Fr. General, and then post our discussions onto an online discussion board.

•  Create an international Jesuit prayer circle, so that every hour of every day, someone was praying for the intentions of the Church and the intentions of Jesuit alumni.

• Create an online fundraising site to feature Jesuit-sponsored projects serving the poor.

• Launch a social entrepreneur plan competition each year, and fund the best social entrepreneurship plan, and draw on Jesuit alumni expertise to give a business training bootcamp to the best plans.

• Compile a directory of those of us who are willing to offer consulting skills, in business planning, accounting, administration, etc, on a pro bono basis to small Jesuit enterprises that might need our help.

• Create avenues and media for the Jesuits and the Jesuit general to talk to us directly, instead of relying only on our schools: tell us directly what are the Society’s needs and priorities, maybe we can help! We all know what is the most important priority of the Jesuit school we graduated from; but if we are truly men and women for others, we should know what are the top needs and priorities of the Society around the world.

• We need to network ourselves, but the Jesuits also need to network themselves! Once I was going to India and called a Jesuit friend in New York to request the email address of a Jesuit there in India. He told me that he only had access to the contact information for Jesuits in his own country: I was shocked. Even in the 1980s, I had a phone book with every officer of JP Morgan all over the world: how could the Jesuits, who founded the whole idea of networking in many ways, now be so far behind? In order to motivate the rest of us laypeople to be better networked, the Jesuits themselves must help point the way.

• Join Jesuit Networking, add your name to the Facebook page, add a comment, share your own ideas, register yourself to learn more about  networking.

Are all these good ideas? No, I’m sure half of them are terrible ideas. Unfortunately, I do not know which are good and which are terrible! That’s why we need to work together as a network, to critique the bad ideas, and to surface and support the best ones.
And, even if we try terrible ideas and they fail, that is fine. Here’s what the famous Irish poet Beckett said: “Fail Again. Try Again. Fail better.” Others will learn from our lessons and take the next step.
After all, here is how the pope put it:
“A church that doesn’t get out, sooner or later, gets sick from being locked up…. It’s also true that getting out in the street runs the risk of an accident, but frankly I prefer a church that has accidents a thousand times to a church that gets sick.”
My brothers and sisters. Let’s make some noise. Let’s run the risk of accidents. Let’s be worthy successors of Frs Kircher, Velaz, Arrupe, Xavier, Claver. Let’s turn our network into what it can become.
This post is an excerpt of a Chris Lowney’s talk at World Union Jesuit Alumnae Meeting in Medellin (Colombia) on 16th August 2013. The whole conference may be found on this website [English] [Spanish]. Photo from Flickr by William Hook.