About Us

… from Len Calabrese, President, Catholic Community Connection

Catholic Community Connection, an organization of Catholic sponsored education, health care, human services and senior living ministries, fosters collaboration to respond to the needs of all people within the diocese of Cleveland. Inspired by our Gospel values, we will provide leadership to build collaboration to service human needs through the teaching, healing and caring ministry of Jesus.

Our mission, vision and values statement comes out of a strategic planning process that was completed last summer (2008) after many months of hard work following a merger of Catholic Community Care (which was an alliance of Catholic providers of human services in the Diocese of Cleveland collaborating to enhance the quality of life for older adults & those with chronic conditions) with Caritas Connection, which was formed in 2002 as a non profit partnership between Cleveland Catholic Charities Health & Human Services and the Sisters of Charity Health System, which is sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine.

Catholic Community Connection breaks new collaborative ground locally and nationally for the sake of advancing shared missions to care for those on the margin of society and working toward a continuum of care. Catholic Community Connection builds on the Cleveland Diocese’s strong support for social ministry, which has been advanced in the past few decades by Bishops Issenmann and Hickey, by Bishop Pilla for over 25 years and now carried on by Bishop Richard Lennon, as well as by the contributions and sacrifices of numerous religious women, priests and lay people.

Catholic Community Connection members enflesh the social mission of the Church in Northeast Ohio; they make it real and practical in our communities. All the members provide a range of valuable services for our church and our communities. They are outstanding and they are each a major anchor and contributor to our Northeast Ohio region. You cannot imagine our communities without them. As Bishop Lennon has said, ‘They are tremendous presences of God who cares about each person now and forever."

I am privileged to see first hand how the teaching, healing and caring ministry of Jesus is being carried out every day by dedicated leaders, professionals and staffs. It is a great story of Christian love being put into action right here in our own communities. We have a great history and legacy in the Diocese of Cleveland. We stand on the shoulders of giants, those who have gone before us, who have created this impressive network of collaborative ministries. Now it is our time to continue and sustain these exemplary social ministries; our time to not only talk the talk of Gospel values but also to walk that walk in practical, meaningful ways as the people of God in Northeast Ohio.

Catholic Community Connection has tremendous legacies that are committed to creating access for all God’s people, legacies of living out the Gospel and of carrying out the great social mission of the Church, especially legacies pioneered by amazing religious.