Michael Reichert has a long list of titles and accomplishments, starting with his work as president and CEO of Catholic Community Services and the Archdiocesan Housing Authority. In his 24 years at CCS, Reichert grew the budget from $2 million to over $70 million a year. As president and trustee of the Catholic Charities Foundation in western Washington, he oversees a staff of more than 3,000 serving nearly 80,000 individuals in 23 counties. He has countless stories to relate about growing up in the Indian way, about land negotiations between Indian tribes and Catholic priests, and about his work in virtually every community in the state of Washington. His conversation is peppered with quotations and historical allusions.
But he is curiously reticent when it comes to talking about himself and what motivates him. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s what I do. I don’t have a lot to say about myself. I was born into a family. My mother’s a beautiful Indian woman. My father’s a red-haired, blue-eyed German American. I was raised in the Indian way. I have strong Catholic roots. I was raised in a bicultural setting without even knowing it.”
That clarity about his origins guided his work. “I just went wherever Indian people were. It wasn’t a conscious decision. The way I was raised up, you just take care of the folks around you.” Responding to the needs around him, he has fought tract developments, established food banks and senior service centers, set up health clinics and addiction treatment centers, and negotiated tribal land rights. He has worked with the full range of Washington State’s ethnic communities, and says his upbringing side-by-side with Italian, Polish, and Jewish neighbors prepared him well for his work.
“People who come out of this multicultural mix end up with multiple radar screens going on simultaneously,” he said. “You look at what’s happening on a subliminal level. In physics, you know that light bends to invisible forces. That’s what I watch.”
And instead of trying to help communities bend to the mainstream, Reichert focuses on strengthening communities by deepening their core cultural values, a focus that he has brought to Wildflowers. He says power comes from within the communities. “If not, the culture wouldn’t have survived this long. I go into every situation knowing that there’s a powerful center and all we have to do is find it, and great things happen.”
Reichert is vice president of Wildflowers Institute and has been a senior fellow since 2000.