Too Much Paid Work?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 01, 2005

My last comments in this section were written one week ago on Good Friday. Since then, my determination to write something every day or two has been thwarted by what most of us would consider a happy circumstance: too much paid work.

Trinity Communications (the non-profit corporation which runs CatholicCulture.org) is largely supported by a parallel for-profit corporation named Trinity Consulting. The staffs are identical, but everyone is paid by Trinity Consulting, where we design web sites, provide networking and computer support, write web-based business software, and do a variety of other tasks for which other businesses are willing to pay. We are very selective, and undertake nothing that conflicts with the Catholic principles the non-profit corporation was established to advance. The payments we receive provide over 95% of our income.

If there is a cloud to this silver lining, it is that sometimes the clients who pay us keep us so busy that we can't do all we should on the non-profit side. As we've gradually built up the scope of our Catholic activities, this problem has become more acute. Approximately 40% of our staff time is devoted to Catholic initiatives which bring in less than 5% of our income. While wonderful, this is frequently too little time and energy to be as effective as we need to be. The demands of paid work must be met first.

The solution, inevitably, is to generate more income on our "Catholic side". Happily, we don't need anything like full support to continue and even increase our Catholic efforts, but we need to do better than 5%. Therefore, during the course of this year we will gradually implement various support initiatives through CatholicCulture.org to enhance our operating budget. I hope and pray that these will be successful—precisely because the demands of paid work must be met first.