One Spirit Announces New Co-CEO Leadership Structure

Dear Members of the One Spirit Student and Graduate community:

As our CEO, Ilene Sameth, prepares for retirement, we have been working hard to identify new leadership to coordinate our passions and skills, drive educational strategy, and champion our cultivation of a new wave of spiritual leaders for the 21st Century and for a flourishing world.   

We wanted you to be among the first to hear about the developments and next steps on the search for our next CEO. As you are probably aware, One Spirit has been moving toward an increasingly collaborative organizational structure, with co-leadership teams in every educational program. The succession team and Board of Trustees have decided to build on this successful momentum and embrace that structure in One Spirit’s executive leadership by engaging two Co-Chief Executive Officers. After completion of the search and hiring process, One Spirit will be served by two Co-CEOs who will co-create the future of education and organizational structure at One Spirit and maximize our capacity to stretch us into our vision. 

We are thrilled to announce that Gordon Brode, our current Director of Organizational Development, will be filling half of this team. 

Gordon has not only been a long-standing part of the operations team, he has built many of our business processes and the ways we embrace technology in service to learning. But in addition to these kinds of technical and financial skills, he holds a capacity for visioning new models of organizational growth that few can match, and he has been deeply steeped in antiracism work both here and in his personal development. He is a 2015 graduate of Seminary and holds a Master of Science in Positive Organization Development & Change from Case Western Reserve University, that he worked toward during his time here, applying action research and collaborative change methods to One Spirit’s work. He is a model of collaborative team building and we would not have moved to this model of co-leadership without him. His very presence at One Spirit has made this move possible. You can read more about Gordon here. 

We are actively seeking the complementary half of this Co-CEO team and are excited to have retained the firm gumbs + partners to perform a robust executive search. We want to encourage you to read both the context setting for this search and the job description we are posting to help us find the right candidates for this special opportunity. If you know great people who would flourish in this highly collaborative model or people who could nominate outstanding candidates, please send an email to Lauren Gumbs at lgumbs@gumbspartners.com. Be sure to include the person’s name, contact information, and whether or not you wish Lauren to use your name when reaching out to them. 

We are very excited by this new model of leadership at One Spirit and hope you are too. If you have questions about this new direction, please let us know by emailing listening@1spirit.org. One of our mottos is “Out of Many, One Spirit.” We want to hear from you, so please feel free to connect with us as you feel called. 

Sincerely, 

CEO Succession Committee:
Rev. Linda Bjork, Board Of Trustees
Rev. Annamma Abraham Kaba, Board Of Trustees
Rev. Brad Learmonth, President, Board Of Trustees
Rev. Emilie Unterweger, Treasurer, Board Of Trustees
Rev. Lina Ziurys, Secretary, Board Of Trustees
Rev. Dr. Khadijah Matin, Co-facilitator Interspiritual Counseling and Companioning
Rev. Sushmita Mukherjee, Seminary Year Two Dean
Rev. Salome Raheim, Seminary Year One Dean
Gordon Brode, Director of Organization Development
Ilene Sameth, Chief Executive Officer