Protecting Stewards from the Stewardship Role

Every institution that depends on stewardship faces a specific failure mode that is rarely named explicitly but is consistently devastating when it occurs: the people doing the stewardship become so absorbed in the role that they lose the development that the role depends on. They become functional rather than alive. They hold the system together in ways that extract from themselves what they are committed to cultivating in others.

Providence's stewardship design must address this explicitly and structurally. The required elements include: rotation requirements that ensure no stewardship role is held by a single person or small group indefinitely, protecting both the institution from the brittleness that comes with stewardship monoculture and the stewards from the stagnation that comes with indefinite role occupation; supervision structures in which stewards are themselves stewarded — in which there are people whose responsibility is to attend to the development and wellbeing of those in stewardship roles; economic support that ensures stewardship roles are economically viable without requiring stewards to choose between the institution and their external economic lives; and explicit development commitments that treat the ongoing development of stewards as a constitutional obligation of the institution rather than a benefit contingent on operational circumstances.