| Page 2 of 2 < |
Bringing Faith To Bear on Firms
Sister Valerie Heinonen has business administration and education degrees.
(By Helayne Seidman for The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
"She has shared her concerns with us directly, not by taking them somewhere else and trying to make an embarrassing situation," said Gwendolyn King, a board member at Lockheed Martin at Bethesda. "If she has a disagreement with me, she'll put her velvet elbow in my eye, and she'll still be a friend."
After Lockheed's shareholder meeting in April, King recalled that chief executive Robert J. Stevens was engrossed in a conversation with Heinonen.
"She was making it very clear: 'Okay, I agree with you on that one. But I still want to talk to you about this one,' " King said. "He went over there, and he was taking notes."
Last year, Heinonen teamed up with community groups to file a shareholder resolution at Synagro Technologies of Houston, the parent company of a sewage plant in the Bronx that had long been the target of some residents' ire for its odor. The proposal, sponsored by the Mercy Investment Program, called on the company to report "at reasonable cost and omitting proprietary information, on environmental, health and safety impacts" of the New York Organic Fertilizer Co. plant.
The response was immediate. Synagro flew in top management for a series of discussions with residents over the past year. Alvin L. Thomas II, Synagro's general counsel who attended the meetings, said Heinonen played a critical role as mediator, supporting residents while also explaining the need to run a business.
"She demands a very high level of decorum, and made sure we had a very well thought out agenda prior to the meetings," Thomas said, adding that previous meetings with the sewage plant's managers and residents would sometimes "get a little out of control."
Synagro in April was bought out by Carlyle Group, a private equity firm in the District, and is no longer subject to shareholder resolutions.
"But we told them we want to continue the process," Thomas said. "We think the relations between NYOFCo and the community have never been better."
