ERA Group helps Catholic Charities of Denver put millions back towards mission

The Client

Catholic Charities of Denver shelters, feeds, houses, educates, counsels, and provides emergency assistance and critical services to people in Northern Colorado. As one of the largest of Catholic Charities’ 167 chapters across the United States, Catholic Charities of Denver’s work focuses on a wide spectrum of ministries: including affordable housing; early childhood education; as well as shelter, women, senior, family, kinship, parish, community, and counseling services.

Over the past year, CCD assisted more than 53,000 individuals, furnished over 125,000 nights of shelter, and provided 400,000 meals. The organisation operates with an annual budget of $60 million and approximately 600 employees.

The Challenge

A deficit of centralised internal labour resources and external procurement practices hindered CCD from scaling services, consolidating vendors, enhancing efficiency — and realising cost savings.

CCD’s housing ministry (Archdiocesan Housing, Inc (“AHI”)) accounts for approximately half of all the services the organisation provides annually. AHI comprises 30 properties with 1,700 units, accommodating around 3,500 residents. Facilities management represents a cornerstone expense across the ministry and utilises numerous internal resources, including maintenance technicians, janitors, custodians, housekeepers, and other personnel. The organisation also engages with several hundred external service vendors for property-related maintenance services.

Like many nonprofits, CCD operates without a centralised procurement function that looks across the entirety of the organisation and see where scale, vendor consolidation, and buying power could be employed to save money and increase efficiency and services. CFO Phil Vottiero knew Catholic Charities of Denver would benefit from such a function, but he realised it might need to come from outside the organisation.

The Solution

ERA established a hybrid internal facilities management model to oversee vendors and internal labour whilst upholding stringent service standards.

In late 2020, Vottiero brought in ERA Group. ERA Group's charge was to look at the totality of agency spending and create different workflows allowing CCD to evaluate its spending across many areas, with housing chief among them.

“To have an expert such as ERA come in and be that independent viewpoint, that separate review, allowed us to take a look at how spending was being done and where we were missing opportunities—something we would never have been able to achieve on our own,” says Phil Votterio.

ERA Group determined reducing spending with third-party vendors was only part of the opportunity. In addition to devising a plan for better managing vendors, they elected to examine CCD’s internal labour force to make a real impact.

CCD was unequivocally committed to upholding its obligations to its employees, hence outsourcing to a third party was never considered. They were also resolute that the exceptionally high standard of service to which their residents were accustomed must be maintained.

ERA formulated a hybrid model for the organisation — an “integrated facilities project” — whereby the utilisation of employees would be maximised across the agency, and vendor management would be centralised within a third-party integrated facilities manager (“IFM”). No employees would be made redundant or redeployed.

As turnover occurs – the IFM – in coordination with CCD will evaluate the position and determines whether such a role needs to be replaced or simply supplemented with service hours provided by the IFM. This long-range plan honoured all the organisation’s commitments to staff while allowing for a much more efficient and cost-effective model over time.

ERA assisted in recruiting the appropriate integrated facilities manager to oversee all day-to-day maintenance operations involving both employees and vendors, and to manage capital expenditure projects.

“It is an evolving savings programme because we’ve got a dynamic component —people—that we’re trying to recalibrate so we can start to achieve some of these greater savings," says Vottiero. "ERA has been looking at this in a unique way. We’re seeing how there’s an efficiency gain to be had, as well as how repositioning job responsibilities and being able to look across properties and business entities can recast the picture. I’d never been able to do that before.”

The Result

CCD is positioned to realise maximum efficiencies and over 30% per annum savings in its housing ministry alone, prompting it to request ERA to expand its footprint across the organisation.

At Vottiero’s request, ERA has created an umbrella programme to operate across all ministries to realise financial savings and efficiencies.

“If we do not steward what we are given judiciously, beyond wasting money, resources and energy, we are running counter to what we’re called to do, which is to take what we’re given and utilise it at its maximum efficiency,” says Vottiero.

Every dollar CCD saves allows them to assist more people in need across their ministries. Through the integrated facilities project alone, Catholic Charities of Denver is positioned to save more than $30 million over 10 years.

“ERA is a partner, not a vendor,” Vottiero says. “I can’t emphasise that enough. We’ve all worked with many consultants and contractors in our day, and there are more than many that create more work than they solve. What ERA did from the outset was to create a model that was easy to follow, did not burden any one individual or area, and allowed us to move forward across a wide array of projects.”

“ERA provided us a huge opportunity to further our mission by taking the resources we have been given and allowing us to redeploy savings into additional high-impact programming.”

"If we do not steward what we are given judiciously, beyond wasting money, resources and energy, we are running counter to what we’re called to do, which is to take what we’re given and utilise it at its maximum efficiency." [Phil Votterio, CFO of Catholic Charities of Denver]