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To know Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany is to know Sister Elizabeth “Betsy” Van Deusen, CSJ. For nearly 10 years, Sister Betsy served as Catholic Charities’ Director of Community Partnerships, work­ing with corporations, parishes and volunteers to meet the needs of the community. During COVID, Sister Betsy was the face of Catholic Charities’ Mobile Outreach Vehicle Extension (CC MOVE) program and spearheaded hundreds of food drops and distribution events in a partnership between CC MOVE, the Capital District Area Labor Federation and the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.

It was a no-brainer that when the time came for Vincent Colonno, CEO of Catholic Charities, to retire this July, that Sister Betsy would be right for the role. Her kind-hearted and approachable demeanor is just as strong as her incredible leadership skills and diligent work ethic. Now, eight weeks into her new position, Sister Betsy sits down with Emily Benson from The Evangelist to talk about her work at Catholic Charities, what led her to this role and her faith through it all.

TE:  Tell me about your upbringing?
SB: I grew up in Cobleskill. I was number six in a family of seven. My mother was Catholic, my father was not and we went to church every Sunday, lockstep. When I was a sophomore in high school, two sisters of St. Joseph came to start Catholic Charities in Schoharie County, Betty Giarusso and Marguerite Tierney. That summer Sister Betty invited young people to do a service program where we lived together in the Grange Hall at Breakabeen and did work at a home for people with developmental disabilities in Middleburgh. We did community, we did prayer, and after that experience I said, “Wow, there is something to this.” We had a seminarian that summer and I wrote to him and I said, “I think there’s something to (religious community),” and he responded — I still have the letter — and he said, “If there’s a call Bets, it’ll be there after high school or after college. Go live your life and be about it.”

TE:  That’s some great advice.
SB:  It was great. I learned many years later that my dad said, “If she goes to Saint Rose College, she’s going to become a nun.” My mom was a graduate of The College of Saint Rose and she wanted one of her four daughters to go to Saint Rose, and I said, “There was no way I was going.” She asked, “Would you at least go visit?” and I said, “Yes.” The minute I walked on the campus I knew I had to go there. I just felt this was the place I was supposed to be. My mom graduated in 1946, and I graduated in ’84 (with a BA in sociology and religious studies.)

TE:  Where did you go after you graduated?
SB:  I worked for a year at Simple Gifts bookshop, which was right over on Madison Avenue. It was a not-for-profit, Catholic-worker bookshop, and the conviction around social justice and Catholic social teaching was imbued in me. Then a friend of mine called me and said, “I have a job for you working at a domestic violence shelter in Troy.” This was my first run with Catholic Charities. I went to work at Unity House, which at the time was part of Catholic Charities; first as a counselor and then as the shelter coordinator.

TE:  It can be a lot of heavy work, the roles that you take on. Is it taxing at all?
SB:  We had a great team (at Unity House) and I would say that a lot of people leave domestic violence because they’re burned out. It was the real deal. We had a mom murdered by her husband while their kids were in the shelter. The interesting thing for me, starting my career looking through the lens of power and control, it does shift how you look at the world. The other thing about that too was we were living in crisis, and you really had to have good crisis intervention skills. There’s almost nothing that flaps me because ... the truth of the matter is someone being murdered is a crisis but saying this letter won’t go out until tomorrow, that is not a crisis. That has been my whole life; where that was how I started and that’s how I see the world.

TE:  Walk me through the progression of your career path.
SB:  I was at Unity House when I became a candidate with the Sisters of St. Joseph. I lived in community for two years and, at the end of the two years, I was going to novitiate. The Sisters of St. Joseph novitiate was, at the time, in Denver, Colo., and one day a week I did ministry and worked with Habitat for Humanity. I was working with Catholic churches, sponsoring houses and getting involved with the work of Habitat. I came back and did my second-year novitiate living on the property in Latham, and I said to the sisters, “I never went to Catholic school and to understand our heart, I want to work in a Catholic school.” So I went to Catholic Central High School in Troy as a campus minister for two years.

TE:  Was that a good experience?
SB:  I loved it. When I was at Catholic High, I got a call that a position at St. John’s/St. Ann’s Outreach Center was open, and it was a wonderful combination of direct service, administration, church and social work. (St. John’s/St. Ann’s is a Catholic Charities’ site in Albany’s South End with a food pantry, soup kitchen and furniture program.) I went to St. John’s/St. Ann’s as the director there in 1993. I really started to feel like that was going to be my life’s work, and I really thought the South End was a place where I should really (be), until God had another plan.

TE:  What happened next?
SB:  The president of the local Capital District Habitat for Humanity board (asked), “Will you come on the board?” I said, “I’m going to take final vows in 1995, so after I do that I’d be happy to talk about coming on the board.” (Sister Betsy professed first vows in 1992 and final vows in 1995. In 2015, she celebrated her 25th Jubilee as a Sister of St. Joseph.) I was on the board for seven-to-eight months when the director for Church Relations for Habitat for Humanity International called me and said, “The Catholic Daughters of the Americas want to build a house in Albany and I understand there’s a crazy, Catholic nun on the board, is that you?” I said “Well, I’m the only Catholic nun on the board so what does that say!?” They did a blitz build — a year of planning and a week of building — and we built a house on Osborne Street in Albany. Rick Beech, the Director of Church Relations for Habitat for Humanity, came for the build and stayed with us at the convent, and every few weeks after that he called me and said, “I think you should do church relations,” and I said, “I think I’m where I’m supposed to be.” Then he called me and said, “I have a job in Philly. It would be the Regional Church Relations Manager for the Northeast Region which was New York, Pennsylvania and New England up into Maine.” Then he said, “Would you consider Americus, Georgia?” So I applied. I had nine hours of interviews and by the end of the day I didn’t know if I wanted the job. I went to bed and I said, “Lord, are you gonna give me a clue here?” The next morning I got up and it was a beautiful day in south Georgia in October. I got a call saying Millard Fuller, founder and president of Habitat, wants to see you. I go over and he says to me, “I want to know if you want the job, can you do the job with the help of God, and do you have fire in your belly?” And on my 35th birthday, I accepted the position.

TE:  Was it scary to make that move?
SB:  I didn’t know a soul! But I quickly started making really good friends; it’s just a great community of people. There was a whole group of women, we called it “the breakfast club,” who were middle managers like myself and on Saturday mornings we’d meet at this diner. It was a great support. We still Zoom once a month!

TE:  Where did you get to travel during your time with Habitat?
SB:  Lots of poverty housing and lots of airports. I was the “Director from America,” so I was the excuse for them to be able to do the work. In the United States, we have affiliates … but in other countries they have a national organization and they run the work, and they often need to step it up and I was the excuse to bring people together. Each region of the world had a Church Relations manager — so Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. I had the privilege on five occasions to work with (former President) Jimmy Carter on the Jimmy Carter Work Project. It was 98 degrees in Houston and we built 100 houses. And Mr. Carter is very serious. If his name is on it, there are no shortcuts.

TE:  How did you get back to Albany?
SB:  I kept getting a sense I needed to come home. Habitat celebrated its 25th anniversary in Indianapolis and while we were there, we had a global leadership conference and 9/11 happened. We had to help 40 global leaders from around the world try and get home. I can still see the group of global leaders kneeling down in prayer with us — right now I have goosebumps — because for many of them, they came from places where violence and this kind of thing happened all the time. For those of us in the U.S., it was very unusual and to be with them it was extraordinary. It was tragic and sad but what a privilege to be understood in a way that many would never understand.

But after 9/11, Habitat contributions went down and they eliminated the Department of Church Relations, and I lost my job, as did the rest of my staff around the world. I just kept getting that sense that I needed to get home, so I went home and I worked at Pyramid Life Center with Sister Monica Murphy, CSJ, and at the end of October, I went to work for St. Helen’s parish (now St. Kateri Tekakwitha in Schenectady) as the youth minister. Then on Dec. 10, my father had a tragic accident and died. I had to be home. I didn’t know why before, I just kept getting that sense I needed to be home. That was the confirmation. My mom lived for four more years, but around that time the previous year I was in South Africa, unable to be contacted. I’m sure it was the Holy Spirit doing the guiding because I work really hard at paying attention.

I was at St. Helen’s for 10 years: five years as the youth minister and five years as the director of evangelization, Christian service and outreach, and then in the last three to four years I was the director of the St. Joseph Worker Program, which was sponsored by the Sisters of St. Joseph. When I started to say I think I need to do something else, Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee had just gone through and Catholic Charities was hiring disaster case managers, so I went back to work part-time as a disaster case manager and continued as director of the St. Joseph Worker Program. The following year the person who had been the director of Community Partnerships called me and said, “I want you to do this job.”

TE:  What was it like to work as Director of Community Partnerships?
SB:  It’s been wonderful (to have) opportunities to bring people together around the work of Catholic Charities; to learn what we do and connect people and resources and parish communities with local Catholic Charities, and there are so many more opportunities with it. I hope as I move into this position more deeply that we can really continue to strengthen the bonds between parishes and Catholic Charities because we really are the social services arm of the Church, so to have Catholic folks be engaged in different ways, I think would be a gift to everybody.

TE:  You’re eight weeks in so far as CEO, how has it been going?
SB:  It’s going well! I’ve had the great privilege of talking to a lot of people and doing a lot of listening. And what’s important about that is I gain perspective … and everyone brings something different. The room looks very different depending on where you sit, so I think about it in that way when I’m moving into this role. I’m a collaborator; I want to hear where you’re coming from. I want to get the scope and I want to make the best informed decisions, and the people who work for Catholic Charities and volunteer for Catholic Charities have those perspectives I want to hear from.

TE:  What are some of your goals for the future of Catholic Charities?
SB:  We have a lot of funding from government sources, and one of the priorities needs to be to diversify that funding because we have no idea what’s going to happen in Albany or Washington around those kinds of things. I don’t think we’re going to have fewer people in need, so we need to work very hard to be able to continue the many services that we do. One of the other priorities is to look at what we do best and look at things we should be doing, things we should not be doing, other things we should be doing that we haven’t been doing and to really look at that strategically.

TE:  What do you think is the biggest strength of Catholic Charities?
SB:  The biggest is our staff. We have extraordinary staff everywhere in the system, people are so dedicated. Working in a residence or food pantry during COVID was no picnic, and day-in and day-out, week-in and week-out, our staff was there and they were making it happen. And then we have a huge number of volunteers through CC MOVE that make it happen. Each of our agencies has a board and we have a board of trustees, all of whom are volunteers and who are really prestigious professionals who have thrown their lot into Catholic Charities to make it better and make a difference in our community. It’s very humbling to me to be sitting in this chair and say, “Let’s keep going, we’re doing great stuff, but we can’t stop.” There’s too much need.

TE:  How has your faith helped carry you through this transition?
SB:  When I was in the novitiate, I learned the practice of centering prayer, which is a prayer of consent. It’s where you show up and you shut up. And that has been my sustaining spiritual practice for 35 years. The Eucharist is really important to me, gathering in my community and I have great friends who help to balance my craziness. Locally I have a 3-year-old grandniece, Noel, and an 8-month-old grandnephew, Patrick, and then in Cobleskill, I have grandnephew twins who are 20-months-old, Nash and Hoak. So there’s some little folks in my life! And my family said (when becoming CEO), “How are you going to do this?” And I said, “You’re going to help me do this. You’re going to invite me to things.” We talk a lot about work-life balance now and there are going to be times when somebody else gets to go to work instead of me.

TE:  Do you have a life philosophy?
SB:  I have several. The one, “Be still and know that I am God,” but sitting in this chair right now, it’s “God’s in charge, my job is to listen.”

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