The Most Influential Family Advocate You Probably Hadn’t Heard Of

I n Duval County, Fla., home of Jacksonville, the divorce rate dropped by 24 percent. Officials, experts, and leaders could find no other cause beside the nation’s largest privately funded marriage initiative.

That initiative was possible because one woman shared her vision for saving marriages and growing the church.

Last week, America lost a great marriage and family advocate, and my family has lost a friend. Karen Wright finished her race last Wednesday, passing away after a long and grueling battle with cancer.

Karen was the most influential family advocate you’ve likely never heard of.

It’s not an understatement to say that the parachurch ministry I founded, Communio, would not exist without her.

She was the very first supporter of this work to strengthen families through the local church. Back in 2013, I had a roaring passion, some half-baked ideas, and a loose business plan. While serving at the Philanthropy Roundtable, I was trying to form a task force of businesspeople to find effective strategies that could reverse marital and familial decline, and grow faith practice.

We met and reviewed sweeping data on the societal effects of family breakdown. A mother of four who had gone through her own divorce decided to join first. That was Karen. She understood the problem and stepped forward as both a leader and a generous supporter.

If she hadn’t gotten on board, I don’t think anyone else would have done so. She was the first to give to this work. She not only gave funding; she also gave this movement much-needed credibility in its earliest days. Today, this work is expanding across the nation through Communio’s church-facing ministry, now in 32 states, because of Karen’s compassion for the family.

This past winter, she accepted my invitation to receive an award from Communio at our annual ministry retreat. We wanted to find a meaningful way to express gratitude for the thousands of families still united today in happy and healthy homes as a result of her significant generosity. She cooperated with God to foster generational blessings.

But she was not able to accept our award on that February day. Her cancer had begun to grow more rapidly again, and she became too weak to attend.

One of my most powerful memories of Karen is from the 50th anniversary of the Ariel Corporation in 2016 — sitting at a table full of her employees who had no idea who I was; nor did they know the impact and influence that their boss’s life had on mine. The conversation effortlessly moved to the topic of Karen. That night it felt like a high-medieval-period conversation, talking with pride and affection about a great lady or queen.

My understanding of Karen’s leadership was the big reason why. You see, the matriarch of Ariel Corp., and Mount Vernon, Ohio, shared a personal memory with me of her dad being forced to lay off employees in the 1980s during an energy bust. She remembered how traumatic it was, seeing her father weep because of what it meant for the lives of so many parents and children in their humble Rust Belt town.

Since Karen took over the firm in 2001, she succeeded in never having to lay off employees. The firm stored surplus cash in the good years in order to ride through the inevitable bust years of the natural gas business. Outside of temp roles, Ariel, a large manufacturing operation, never laid off permanent employees during her tenure. If times became bleak, Ariel had a sacrificial company ethos according to which savings would be found in a shared, full-staff furlough rather than a selective layoff.

Karen saw her role as business owner as one of great moral responsibility for her town and also the families who lived there. She treated her employees as what they were — her friends and family made in the image and kindness of God.

Years ago, the De Gance family rolled into Mt. Vernon with our 15-person van, and she personally gave our whole family a tour of the Ariel manufacturing plant. It made quite the impression on our Northern Virginia suburban brood. During that trip, she shared a management innovation she instituted: She had formed new internal manufacturing teams on the factory floor that remained together, with a healthy mix of familial camaraderie within the team and friendly competitiveness with other teams. What she did as a wife- and mom-turned-CEO worked and worked well. The firm boasted low turnover while growing exponentially under her brand of leadership.

Love of country is rooted, as Edmund Burke expressed, in love of home and community. Karen lived this rooted love in spades. She invested heavily in revitalizing her small-town community with a myriad of local philanthropic and small-business investments. Over the many years I knew her, I watched a town transform.

I also watched her grow deeply in her religious faith. Through the crucible of her tremendous suffering (not only the suffering of her own cancer battle, but also the tragic loss from cancer of her second son in his 30s), Karen deepened greatly in her knowledge and love for the Lord.

Karen powerfully shaped many lives — including my own. She was one of the best America has to offer. A patriot who quite literally was born on the Fourth of July.

As we approach our nation’s 250th, Karen Wright should be remembered in the pantheon of modern American heroes. She will remain that to me, by being the first believer in my life’s calling, and also to the countless families she’s touched.