What's Happening

June 5, 2026, Detroit – Participants in the National Gathering of Land Justice Futures, meeting at Weber Retreat and Conference Center at the Adrian Dominican Sisters Motherhouse spent a day exploring the “food hub” of Detroit and what it means for the food sovereignty of Detroit residents.

Land Justice Futures is a nonprofit organization that works primarily with congregations of U.S. Catholic women religious to help them explore how they can bring about racial repair and ecological healing through the land they currently inhabit or use. The hope is to create right relationship of the congregations of women religious with Earth and with peoples who had been forced from the land of their birth or deprived of land access. The Adrian Dominican Congregation has been on this journey with Land Justice Futures for years.

Participating congregations participated in Land Justice Futures’ National Gathering May 19-23, 2026. 

During the journey in Detroit, participants learned about various ways that organizations are working to repair harms caused to Black people through the years. They visited:

• D-Town Farm, an 8-acre urban farm, to learn about community education efforts and its sustainable methods of growing 25 types of fruits, vegetables, and herbs for the benefit of the local community; 
• Detroit Food Commons, which includes a kitchen in which locally produced foods are cooked, a banquet hall, and a co-op community grocery store, all run by the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN); and 
• The Joy Project, a gardening project which invites the community to “remember indigenous practices, taste rarely grown produce, and hear stories about Black and Brown peoples’ current and historic relationship to the soil.”   

View a collection of photos highlighting key experiences of the learning journey in Detroit.

May 19, 2026, Santa Cruz, California – Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, OP, Vice President of Environmental Sustainability for CommonSpirit Health, dedicates her time to ensuring that the departments in all of the system’s 2,200 care sites – including 142 hospitals – are striving to make their departments more environmentally sustainable.

Sister Mary Ellen oversees sustainability program development and implementation across the 24-state healthcare system. Part of her ministry is discovering ways that each care site is working toward sustainability and whether their practices can be successfully duplicated at other sites, so all of the sites “can share the best practices and the challenges,” she said in an interview for the April 2026 issue of Catholic Health World.

Many of the sites have found creative ways to make their work sustainable in large and small ways, Sister Mary Ellen said. For example, to reduce the use of plastic by hospitals, CommonSpirit worked with a company to develop a “mostly biodegradable version” of the single-use plastic needle counters used during surgery, she said.

Sister Mary Ellen appreciates the enthusiasm of the employees in their sustainability efforts. “Our collective dedication to these duties and responsibilities is driven by a singular purpose: to cultivate a more sustainable and healthier environment for our patients and communities,” she said.

Read the entire article by Valerie Schremp Hahn.

Caption for above feature photo: Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, OP, works in the community garden at Dignity Health-Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz.
Adrian Dominican Sisters File Photo