Routinely, at diocesan budget committee meetings and hearings, the question gets asked: Why is it diocesan policy that clergy and lay church employees receive full payment of their health insurance premium as a compensation benefit when this is not the norm in many other professions, especially as compensation costs have become burdensome for a growing number of congregations?
When a preliminary recommendation—that clergy and lay employees begin to pay a percentage of their premiums—was floated for discussion last year, the conversation that followed became divisive.
“People on opposite sides saw this as a justice issue, but for different reasons. The tenor of the debate indicated that there were deeper concerns underlying the financial ones and that, until those issues could be surfaced and dealt with, they were going to be obstacles to good decision making about the health insurance benefit,” explained the Rev. Mally Lloyd, Canon to the Ordinary.
A team of Harvard Law School students is now on the case, following Lloyd’s su
Karl Jun, Felicia Cote and Theodore Hart
ccessful application to the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.
Their charge is to conduct interviews, focus groups and a survey to get at the facts, feelings and history behind the issues at hand, and then provide some analysis and recommend next steps, including a model that will help diocesan leadership carry the conversation forward.
The student team will devote 10 to 15 hours a week to the project over the course of approximately three months. What they get in return is some real-world experience in negotiation, dispute resolution and conflict management.
“The health insurance benefit was the impetus of this project, but it’s my hope that there will be broader practical and relational learnings that come out of it that we’ll be able to apply to other complicated or contentious issues that inevitably come up in our community life,” Lloyd said.
“I have had initial meetings with our student team and agree with their faculty supervisor, Chad Carr, that they seem to have a good balance of interpersonal and analytical skills. They are eager to dig in. I hope and request that people will respond with equal enthusiasm by granting interviews and participating as opportunities present themselves,” she said.
Meet the team
Karl Jun was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Houston, Tex. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2009, majoring in psychology and Plan II Honors—an interdisciplinary liberal arts program. Karl began at Harvard Law School in the fall of 2010 and plans to return to Houston upon graduation to work in the energy-related legal field. He has mediated disputes in small claims court during his first year of law school, and is currently on the board of the Harvard Negotiation Law Review.
Felicia Cote was born and raised in Teaneck, N.J. She is completing a joint JD/MPP program at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She received her undergraduate degree in public policy from Stanford University. Before entering Harvard Law School, she taught high school math for two years in San Jose, Calif., as part of the Teach for America program.
Theodore Hart was born in Singapore and moved with his family to various places in Asia, South America and the United States before settling in New Jersey, where he attended high school and went on to study political science, Japanese and Chinese at Rutgers University. Prior to coming to Harvard Law School in 2010, Theo worked for two years as a coordinator of international relations for a city in southern Japan.