In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Kerry Alys Robinson walked through New Orleans in 2005 and witnessed block after block of splintered houses, flooded schools, and broken dreams.
Robinson surveyed the devastation with Geoff Boisi, the founder of Leadership Roundtable, a new organization of lay and religious leaders created to elevate best practices in leadership and management of the Catholic Church following the sexual abuse crisis. Months earlier, Boisi had recruited Robinson to be Leadership Roundtable’s founding executive director, and now the Archdiocese of New Orleans wanted their help to rebuild the city’s Catholic schools.
“It was looking at the gates of hell—and coming from New York and having lived through 9/11, I never thought I would see anything more devastating than that, but Katrina went on for miles and miles,” Boisi said. “I watched Kerry put together a team and gain the confidence of Archbishop [Alfred C.] Hughes, and we got the parochial system up and running a year before the public school system was able to function.”
Robinson’s ability to look squarely at challenges and lead organizations to find consensus solutions led to her 2023 appointment as CEO and executive director of Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA), the domestic humanitarian arm of the Catholic Church in America.
Her enthusiasm for providing service to vulnerable people, as well as her advocacy for leadership roles in the Church for women, laity, and young people, led Notre Dame to award Robinson the 2025 Laetare Medal—the oldest and most prestigious honor given to American Catholics—at Notre Dame’s 180th University Commencement Ceremony on May 18.
“To be awarded the Laetare Medal is an honor I could never have imagined,” Robinson said in late April at the Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters of CCUSA. “I truly believe that this honor is an honor for Catholic Charities—for the 45,000 people who work at Catholic Charities across this country and the 215,000 volunteers who are so generous and dedicated.”
Founded in 1910, Catholic Charities USA is a national membership organization that supports and represents 168 Catholic Charities agencies across the United States. Collectively, the Catholic Charities network each year serves more than 15 million vulnerable people, regardless of their faith or background, through food and nutrition programs, affordable housing, disaster relief, and a variety of other humanitarian services.
Artwork illustrating the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan features prominently in both her office and the lobby of CCUSA.
“At Catholic Charities, we are the Good Samaritan, and we are also the innkeeper tasked with caring for people that everyone else has walked by and refused to acknowledge,” Robinson said. “Without this commitment, our world would be so cold. Who would want to be part of a church or a country without mercy?”
Surrounded by mercy
Born into philanthropy, Robinson is a great-grandchild of John and Helena Raskob, whose Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities has an 80-year history of serving the Church across the world. Born in London and raised primarily in Washington, DC, Robinson said her large family is kept close by its mission to serve the social justice and charitable efforts of the Church.
“From the youngest age that I can remember, we were exposed to women and men—ordained, religious, and lay from all over the world—whose lives were dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering,” she said. “They often bore witness to the worst of what humankind can do to one another and to our common home. And yet because of faith, they wanted and felt compelled to respond in a positive manner.
“Growing up and seeing the connection between a purposeful life and interior freedom and palpable joy—all in service to making this a better world, to alleviating human suffering, to advancing social justice—that was so deeply compelling to me.”
Robinson began her service to the Church at age 14 as a member of the Raskob Foundation and also got involved with FADICA, a consortium of private family foundations interested in Catholic causes. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Divinity School.
Over her career, Robinson has been an adviser to and trustee of more than 25 grantmaking foundations, charitable nonprofits, and family philanthropies. She also served for 15 years on the national committee for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Her philanthropic background made her a natural for fundraising, and in 1997 Rev. Robert Beloin, the Catholic chaplain at Yale, recruited her to direct development for the Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel at Yale. She led a $75 million fundraising campaign to construct a Catholic student center and expand and endow an intellectual and spiritual ministry. She said Father Bob helped her understand “that philanthropy and fundraising are two sides of the same coin.”
Robinson cited Father Beloin and Mercy Sister Margaret Farley, a Yale theologian and ethicist, as guiding mentors. Geoff Boisi noted that Robinson treated Father Beloin like a member of her own family and exhibited her trademark compassion by helping him through his sickness and death in 2018.
When the Church sexual abuse crisis first hit in the early 2000s, Robinson suspended fundraising efforts and focused on planning a major conference to address harmful systemic problems.
“Father Bob and I were trying to figure out how we can be part of the solution at this hour in our Church’s greatest need,” she said. “When your family is in crisis, you do everything possible to effect healing and reconciliation. We are not abandoning it [the Church], we are staying and calling it to greater levels of accountability, transparency, holiness, and trustworthiness.”
Her work on the conference and with Yale led directly to meeting Boisi, who recruited Robinson to Leadership Roundtable for a dedicated effort to rebuild the Church.
Restoring trust
Robinson spent two decades leading Leadership Roundtable. She became a strong advocate for young adults and women to have meaningful leadership positions in the Church all the way up to the decision-making tables at the Vatican.
“Because I was invited into this work as a teenager and encouraged and nurtured as a young adult, I felt very strongly that the Church is impoverished without the presence of women and young adults,” she said. “We are all myopic in our own narrowly defined group. We need the wisdom and perspective and experience and insight of each other to be healthy and whole.”
Boisi said Robinson’s strengths include her “inspirational style of communication” and her ability to build relationships broadly, both within the Church hierarchy and with the laity, including groups for women and young people.
“There wouldn’t be a Leadership Roundtable today if it hadn’t been for the respect that Kerry commands across the spectrum of the Church in the United States and Rome as well,” he said. “She engages people intellectually, but her level of enthusiasm and optimism is something that just draws other people into the mission. She always sees the positive side and she can bring you back to center and looking forward in an exceptional way.”
These same qualities have made Robinson a popular speaker in Catholic circles. She is the author of a prize-winning book, Imagining Abundance: Fundraising, Philanthropy, and a Spiritual Call to Service. For more than a decade, she participated in regular meetings with the Vatican to advise the Church on how to empower and engage women leaders.
Ellen Koneck is the executive director of Commonweal, a 100-year-old magazine and media entity run by Catholic lay people that covers politics, culture, and the arts with a Catholic lens. Koneck first met Robinson as a graduate student at Yale Divinity School about a decade ago, and the two have become good friends as women “navigating the world of professional Catholicism.”
“Women like Kerry are, I think, opening doors and paving the way for many others,” Koneck said. “I don’t necessarily know how to convince somebody who isn’t already seeing that their mothers and daughters and grandmothers are uniquely capable of leading in ways that ought to be rewarded with positions.”
Koneck said Robinson’s work at Leadership Roundtable and Catholic Charities is fundamentally about not looking away from the most broken parts of the Church and world. Instead, leadership is about taking responsibility and rebuilding relationships.
“When I think of Kerry’s work, these are the efforts around transparency, around responsibility, around direct aid and service to the most vulnerable people,” Koneck said. “This is the best case we can make for the Catholic Church, and Kerry is at the helm of those things.
“Yet I would press anyone who knows her to find somebody who is not immediately struck by her sense of hope. There’s a delight in her that radiates, and it’s inexhaustible.”
Serving the vulnerable
Robinson said her moral heroes have always been the people doing the difficult fieldwork of corporal acts of mercy. The opportunity in 2023 to lead Catholic Charities USA as only the second woman and second layperson to be director was an answer to her prayers. She cited the late Pope Francis and said his life and witness taught all Catholics about accompaniment.
“What I love about Catholic Charities is that it doesn’t matter who you are, what your background is, what your faith is, whether you have faith at all—we will serve you because you are in need and your human dignity deserves to be restored, upheld, and defended,” she said.
Her dedication to the Catholic Charities mission even inspires her to commute weekly from Connecticut to the CCUSA headquarters in Alexandria. She is married to Dr. Michael Cappello, chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health and a professor of pediatrics and microbial pathogenesis at Yale School of Medicine. They have two adult children, Christopher and Sophie.
In today’s hyperpartisan political divide, Robinson understands why the Church’s social services, especially its ministry to migrants, have come under an attack of misinformation. Still, she believes the Church should lean into its long history of Catholic social teaching, which offers an antidote to isolation and a secret to joy.
“I think the best way to counter misinformation in this age is to be unapologetically and authentically who you are in the world, and who we are is a merciful response to human anguish,” she said. “My colleagues at Catholic Charities across the country are caring for the poor, upholding human dignity, offering mercy, sowing the seeds of peace, and promoting justice. What a beautiful gift to be part of this.”
Each of the 168 Catholic Charities agencies across the country is a separate nonprofit under its local diocese. CCUSA acts as the national umbrella organization in which each agency is a dues-paying member. Its roles include convening local leadership to share best practices and resources, highlighting positive achievements, and providing advocacy and communications resources.
Kelley Tuthill, president and CEO of Catholic Charities Boston and a 1992 Notre Dame graduate, said Robinson’s leadership has provided a “strong, clear voice about why we do what we do that has been tremendously helpful.” Tuthill said charity services don’t have any control over immigration policy; they just respond to what’s needed.
“In Boston, we were founded over a hundred years ago because of the deplorable conditions of Irish immigrants,” Tuthill said. “So that’s our legacy, and what our faith compels us to do is to ease suffering.
“So I think that lifting her work at a time when everything is so brought into question, it’s meaningful. And I’m proud of Notre Dame for choosing someone I think is very worthy of this award.”
Robinson said she is also thankful, even though her role is largely to support, enhance, and publicize the incredible work of so many people inspired by their faith to help the most vulnerable in our country.
“I would characterize my leadership style as being a joyful, encouraging, enthusiastic, hope-filled presence,” Robinson said. “I always think of the people with whom I work and the people who benefit from our collective mission as the real protagonists of the story. And my job is to remove obstacles and impediments to allow this mission to flourish.”
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