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Copyright © 2004 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee | July / August 2004 |
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| ER-D adds Southeast director |
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By Emily McDonald Susan Holmes logged onto the Episcopal Relief and Development Web site to give in a gift in memory of Bishop Robert G. Tharp and ended up becoming ER-D’s director of Southeast operations.
“I was clicking around and found the job posting,” she said. “It was really one of those moments when I got goose bumps.” She said the job connected her background in raising funds for educational institutions with several areas of ER-D involvement.
Episcopal Relief and Development is an international relief agency with projects around the world. It began in 1940 to provide assistance to refugees fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and now provides assistance in three main areas: relief, rehabilitation and community building.
Holmes, who lives in Chattanooga, began working with ER-D in October. The position of Southeast director is a new one, and she is one of two regional directors employed by the agency. The other is Brian Sellers-Petersen of Seattle, Wash. “We pretty much divide up the country,” she said. “I travel 60 percent of the time.”
Although raising money for the Bishop Tharp Business and Technology Institute in Les Cayes, Haiti, is a primary focus for Holmes, she provides information and speaks about all aspects of ER-D’s work. Episcopal Relief and Development is “not just about what we are doing,” she said. “It is about what Episcopalians together are doing. It is the ministry of the church to the whole world.”
Holmes has been a fund raiser for the past 15 years. She was vice president of Chattanooga CARES, which provides services for people with HIV and AIDS. She served as associate vice president of academic affairs at Chattanooga State Technical Community College and was involved in development and fundraising at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
A native of Arkansas, Holmes saw firsthand the kind of assistance ER-D, then known as the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief, could provide. The town where she was raised, Van Buren, was helped by the fund after a hurricane. “The Episcopal Church was one of those who did a lot of outreach to people,’’ she said.
Holmes is a lifelong Episcopalian and a member of Otey Memorial Parish in Sewanee.
For more information
about Episcopal Relief and Development, please contact Susan Holmes at
(423)266-3975 or (423)280-1480.
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