Remembrance by Mark Davis-Craig
I met Jim Schairbaum in the spring of 2006 shortly after I joined St Clare’s. Jim was the head of our Haiti Outreach Mission (HOM) efforts. He had written a note in the bulletin that HOM needed help preparing computers to be donated to Haitian schools. That activity appealed to me as an IT professional who speaks French. I talked to him at coffee hour and he asked me to go to Livonia that very night to help.
Professionally, Jim was a project manager for Ford Motor Company. One of Jim’s greatest strengths as a project manager was quickly ascertaining other people’s strengths and helping them contribute most effectively to the project. We think of project managers as task masters keeping the schedule on track. But the best project managers are people like Jim who make personal connections with all the team members. Jim would learn every skill each team member possessed and find out what they liked and didn’t like doing so that the project roles were distributed most effectively.
Personally, Jim was a generally quiet man with many strengths that he himself used effectively. That’s a nice way of saying he knew what he wanted, knew how to get it, and usually got it.
I didn’t go to Haiti in 2006. Jim didn’t ask me to. The primary mission was medical. The secondary mission was construction. The computers were just an idea: an ancillary effort in the overall project of the 5-day mission trip to Mirebalais, Haiti.
Over the course of 2006-2007, Jim monitored the Haitian computer usage as best he could. When he got to Haiti in 2007, he learned that only one of the five computers brought down the previous year was still usable, but that having computers at the school was a game-changer for education.
Yet another of Jim’s amazing leadership skills was communication. He held quarterly meetings of all interested St Clarians to keep them apprised of our HOM work. Through those meetings, we got to know one another better and he mentored me. He asked me to join the mission trip in 2008 to work with a Haitian IT guy who didn’t speak English. Together we created a computer lab of 11 new computers at the Episcopal church school in Mirebalais. All 11 computers still worked in 2009.
My story about Jim is a microcosm for St Clare’s. Every one of us has skills which may be useful in the mission of this parish. I’d love it if we talked about our little-known gifts during coffee hour. For instance, few people know that I can do calligraphy. Barb Kilbourn is an award-winning quilter. As a former library director, Kathy Daly knows a lot about construction in public buildings. Jim Schairbaum was an exceptional manager.