The Woman Behind Ecumen

An executive recruiter contacted Roberts for the Board of Social Ministry’s leadership position. “My predecessor had been here for 20-some years,” she recalls. “And really, he left behind an organization that had a bunch of nursing homes where the care was absolutely fabulous, deeply rooted in our faith-based history. But it was kind of a sleepy, unknown company.” As for the agency’s board members, “I had had the impression they were a fairly conservative, risk-averse group.”

Roberts may have seemed like an unusual candidate, but she has made a career of taking unusual paths. Risk averse she’s not. She’s earned graduate degrees in education and education administration, served as director of the management analysis division of the state Department of Administration and as acting commissioner of human rights, among other state government positions. She took the job at the Minnesota Zoo in 1986, where her collaborative, outside-the-box style was honed.

But as she began to interview at the Board of Social Ministry, her perceptions quickly changed—as it became clear that the board members wanted change themselves. “The board said, ‘We really need to transform the business,’” Roberts recalls. “I remember when I came in and they asked me the question, ‘What is the hospitality model in senior services?’ So I’m on Google, I’m trying to figure out what the ‘hospitality model’ is because I hardly knew what ‘senior services’ were. They knew they needed something different than what was going on.”

Roberts’ marching orders: Change Ecumen’s mix of revenues and instill in it a new culture that encourages new ways of thinking and the creation of better approaches to senior living—far beyond the old paradigm of nursing homes.

Roberts’ first step was to examine the revenue mix. Five years ago, nursing homes accounted for 76 percent of the company’s revenues. “If we would have kept the number of nursing homes that we had, and had continued to provide the services under Medicaid that we do,” she says, “we would have been a 140-year-old nonprofit that would have gone out of business.”

With Roberts in charge, 2004 would be the great year of change for the Board of Social Ministry. For one thing, it got a new name. “Ecumen,” derived from the Greek word for “home” (and related to the word “ecumenical,” suggesting a broadening of the Board of Social Ministry’s work), was evidence that the organization was pursuing a fresh direction.