UPDATE: 32 people will lose their jobs at MCC U.S.

by Everett J. Thomas

After four years and more than $1 million in expenses, Mennonite Central Committee has announced that its restructuring process will mean 32 people will lose their jobs at MCC U.S. Ron Byler, MCC U.S. executive director, made the announcement in a Jan. 20 letter to MCC alumni.

The restructuring means that MCC Binational will disappear. Arli Klassen’s role as executive director for MCC Binational will also end on March 31.

“Much of the work in Akron [Pa.] is moving,” Klassen said on Jan. 20. “Some is moving to international (locations) and some to Canada.”

According to Klassen, MCC Binational was the organizational way MCC Canada and MCC U.S. related.

“We have decided to rebalance how Canada and the U.S. work together,” Klassen said. “MCC Binational is how we’ve made MCC work for the past 90 years. There’s been frustration … because MCC Canada did not have a say in international programs. … The tensions (between MCC Canada and MCC U.S.) will always be there. But the programs will now be directly owned by both partners.”

The new structure will not eliminate any functions within the MCC system, Klassen said, but those functions will be performed through new roles. Klassen was uncertain whether the new roles would mean more MCC employees in Canada and in international locations.

“We're still trying to get a handle on staffing,” Klassen said.

Who will be employed was the reason one MCC Binational board member voted against the proposal, the only one to do so. James Logan of Earlham, Ind., was unhappy with the impact the changes would have on the ethnic, racial and gender contributions of staff working throughout all levels of MCC.

“I am especially concerned that, with painfully sparse exceptions, the executive levels of the reconfigured MCC will be even more intensively governed by white North American peoples,” Logan said in an email on Jan. 23. “White power and privilege, institutionally, routinely expresses itself in the deafening silence of intellectual amnesia, willful ignorance and entitled smugness in the names of openness, toleration, hospitality and (I dare say) in the name of Christ.”

In response to this charge, Klassen listed the changes that will take place.

“The proportion of staff who are people of color will change from 14 percent in April 2011 in the U.S head office to 11 percent in April 2012,” Klassen said in an email on Jan. 23. “However, the proportion of people of color who are working with MCC throughout the U.S. (including the head office and the regional offices) will grow from 24 percent in April 2011 to 26 percent in April 2012.”

While the restructuring process, called “New Wine/New Wineskins,” will mean significant internal changes, it will have little effect on how supporters relate to MCC and its programs, Klassen said.

“Does this change how (the person in the pew) relates to MCC? It does not,” Klassen said.

In his letter to MCC alumni, Byler listed additional ways the restructuring will change MCC.

“Stronger accountability to the Anabaptist denominations” is one such change Byler described.

Klassen explained that currently some of the people on the 12 MCC boards of directors are not appointed by their denominations, and the denominations of which they are a part say those board members do not officially represent their denominations.

“The way people are appointed is different from board to board,” Klassen said. “Now it is stipulated that at least two-thirds of each board must be appointed by the denomination.”

Another change Byler listed in his letter is the way MCC will relate to an emerging international network of relief and service efforts. It is currently called the Global Anabaptist Service Network, Klassen said, and many people are unaware that other national church bodies within Mennonite World Conference have their own relief and service programs independent of MCC.

“They are asking MCC to help them grow their own capacity for service,” Klassen said. “They want to create their own network (of relief and service programs). They do not want MCC to coordinate it but to be a partner in it.”

The Wineskins process has also tightened up the branding that each of the remaining boards will do in the future. Byler said that “a small symbol of our commitment to work together” is a new logo color and shared tagline: Relief, development and peace in the name of Christ.

While there had been some debate within MCC circles about whether or not to print “In the name of Christ” on cans of meat, Klassen said she has received more letters on the matter than on anything else.

“In some Muslim countries it is seen as a Crusades (statement),” Klassen said. “We have decided not to drop it and have strengthened the phrase by moving it into our mission statement.

The cost of New Wine/New Wineskins, a process that both addressed the mission of MCC through revisioning, and then restructured the organization to carry out that mission, will ultimately total $2.5 million, including the costs of implementing the new structure and severance pay, Klassen said. She also noted that the money for the Wineskins process came almost entirely from operating reserves and not from MCC’s operating budget. The strengthening of the Canada dollar against the U.S. dollar contributed to those balances being higher, Klassen said.

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