Missing Faces: RMM Makes Major Budget Cuts
By Andrew Sharp, Staff writer
Repeated projections throughout the year of a looming financial crisis have become concrete reality at RMM, where upcoming spending cuts will include the elimination of several staff positions in the face of a projected shortfall that could have exceeded $300,000 in 2012.
The board and administrative staff made decisions on the cuts in November. RMM workers were sobered by the news of the elimination of three positions by the end of the year—Director of Church Relations (Tom Beachy), Donor Relations and Development Coordinator (Shawn Eicher), and RIC Maintenance Staff (Randy Nisly). Additional budget cuts came through a reduction in salaries and retirement benefits for all employees in the office and in the field, along with other miscellaneous reductions in spending.
Now the agency’s finances are more stable for 2012, but RMM employees face the troublesome realities many others have experienced in the current economic upheaval. Some are confronting uncertainty about future career paths, and others, the painful loss of coworkers. Human Resources Director Mim Musser said the job losses felt somewhat like a death in a family, in this case the RMM family.
President Joe Showalter made it clear the cuts were not based on job performance, or whether the positions were needed, but were simply driven by financial necessity. “In all three cases there’s going to be a very real loss,” he said. “There’s going to be a number of things that are not going to get done, either at all or as effectively.”
“It was very heavy and painful for all of us,” Scheffel said. He is part of the Executive Team, which together with the board had to make the decision on how to deal with the budget woes. “These people are our family,” he said, but “we felt like we couldn’t just go on and ignore the realities that were staring us in the face.”
These tough realities came from a combination of several factors, Scheffel said. One was an increase in costs in 2011, with contributions staying more or less at 2010 levels. In addition, the Branching Out Campaign, a fundraising effort for costs associated with the Rosedale International Center in Columbus, has not taken off. Currently, less than 40% of needed funds have come in and new giving has been very slow.
Administrators were cautious about whether these cuts would take care of the financial issues in the long term. “It stabilizes us for 2012 and hopefully for the future as well, but that remains to be seen,” Scheffel said.
RMM may be more stable financially now, but will the cuts stop RMM from “branching out?” The focus of the Branching Out Campaign, after all, was expansion through the new facility. Has that been sacrificed for stability? “Expanding our reach is going to look a little different maybe than what we had been doing, and maybe what we envisioned not very long ago,” Showalter said. It “is going to include developing some new programs and tools for equipping CMC in mission, and the RIC is going to be a key place where that can happen,” he said.
Growth, Showalter said, can happen without hiring additional staff. He acknowledged that process will certainly involve some bumps in the road and difficulties in the light of staff cuts, but is still possible. “We need to connect to the resources that are out there in CMC and engage them in some of this programming…helping to create connections, forge partnership, and that sort of thing.”
Making sure RMM continued to fulfill its key mission was a major factor in deciding where to make the cuts. Scheffel noted that over the years, office staffing had increased while the number of mission workers in the field had declined. The eliminated positions were important to RMM. But, Showalter said, “We wanted to protect our core business of sending workers, so it felt like a reduction needed to happen here [in the office] and not somewhere else.”
