Every year, CUA alumni nominate fellow graduates to receive the honor of CUA’s Alumni Achievement Award. And every year, the Alumni Association bestowsthe award on a handful of the nominees who have a national reputation in their fields and have helped make their community and country a better place.
At an April 12 luncheon in the Edward J. Pryzbyla University Center, the university will honor the following five individuals with Alumni Achievement Awards.
Mother to Thousands
 One day in 2002, Dorinda (Carosella) Cavanaugh (B.A. 1966, M.A. 1968) was visiting a Vietnamese orphanage on behalf of the international adoption agency she founded and directs.When she came upon the crib of one 4-month-old girl, the Canadian alumna was moved to tears. The child’s face had been severely mutilated with a machete wielded by her father, who had then thrown her outside to die.
This was the kind of handicapped child that Cavanaugh’s agency, Terre des Hommes Pour les Enfants, had become known for placing with adoptive parents. This baby girl presented particular difficulties, however. Too deformed to have a chance of being adopted in Vietnam, the child also couldn’t be brought to Canada because Vietnam had temporarily suspended all international adoptions. Cavanaugh’s subsequent 10 months of lobbying concluded with Vietnam allowing adoption in this case. A U.S. organization provided 10 reconstructive surgeries over the next four years at no charge, and a loving Canadian family welcomed the girl they named Fleur-Ange (“Flower-Angel”) as their daughter.
Fleur-Ange is now a happy, bouncy 6-year-old, and her odyssey was described in a 2006 feature article in the Montreal newspaper The Gazette.
Cavanaugh’s passion for helping children in need led the Montreal resident to create Terre des Hommes Canada in 1974. That humanitarian agency, whose name translates to “the world of humanity,” has served tens of thousands of children in Honduras and Vietnam by building schools, providing health care and safe water, and offering vocational training for youths. The agency also played a part in establishing more liberal international adoption policies in Canada.
In 1989 Cavanaugh founded an organization wholly dedicated to international adoption, Terre des Hommes Pour les Enfants, which has placed more than 2,000 Vietnamese, Central American and Eastern European children in Canadian families. She and her husband, fellow CUA alum Brendan Cavanaugh (M.A. 1966, Ph.D. 1976), adopted four children — and had one of their own — along the way.
A respected advocate for children, Dorinda Cavanaugh has worked to reduce corruption in international adoption and has participated in lobbying efforts that have helped to win some major legislative advances in Canada. Those advances include allowing hundreds of unaccompanied minors in overseas refugee camps to be brought to Quebec and placed in foster families, the signing of a Canadian-Vietnamese treaty to allow international adoptions, getting new adoptive parents the same parental leave rights as birth parents, and — as recently as Dec. 23, 2007 — changing immigration law so that children adopted from foreign countries can receive immediate citizenship and its attendant rights rather than provisional residency.
Community Builder
 Three hundred and sixty-five foreign companies have a presence in Fairfax County, Va. There are 27 million square feet of office space in the county’s Tysons Corner area. The Tiffany & Co. in Tysons Corner does more business than any other Tiffany’s in the world — including the company’s flagship store in Manhattan.
If Gerald Gordon were part of an encyclopedia series on Virginia, he would have a prominent role in the “F” volume — specifically in the pages dedicated to facts about Fairfax County.
Fortunately for that county, Gordon is more than just a walking encyclopedia. For the past 12 years, the economic development expert has served as president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, which seeks to attract companies to the area and to help expand existing industry. Since earning his Ph.D. in international economics from CUA in 1981, he has become the pre-eminent figure in the internationally recognized and award-winning urban-planning efforts of the county, which forms a large wedge of Washington, D.C.’s western suburbs. Gordon’s efforts to bring in new business and industry have helped lead to the creation of nearly 200,000 new jobs since 1990, and spurred seven Fortune 100 companies to relocate to the county.
His business model has proven so effective that a number of major cities in the United States and abroad have implemented similar programs to bolster their own economies, with successful adaptations of the Fairfax model currently in use in London, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Bangalore and Frankfurt. Gordon’s efforts were directly responsible for Fairfax County being selected to host the 1998 World Congress on Information Technology. His award-winning program has likewise been recognized at events featuring the president and vice president of the United States as well as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Interplanetary Explorer
 Michael Griffin has spent his life pursuing two great loves: academics and aerospace. Those passions led him to CUA in 1972, as a master’s candidate in aerospace science.
After completing his M.S. in 1974, he studied part time at other universities to earn a Ph.D., an M.B.A., and three additional master’s degrees, while, by day, he became a major player in the aerospace field, working at NASA, the Department of Defense, and in private enterprise and academia. If all of that juggling kept him busy, it was only a warm-up exercise for his appointment as administrator of NASA in 2005.
In that role, Griffin has become the face of the U.S. space program, implementing a strategy that will take the United States back to the moon, to Mars and beyond. That may sound glamorous, but Griffin’s plate of responsibilities is overwhelming. Completing the International Space Station, developing a replacement for the space shuttle, putting an astronaut on the moon for a long-term stay, and paving the way to put an astronaut on Mars by the 2030s are just a few of his assignments. Luckily, Griffin says he views his work with the same passion and enthusiasm he felt as a young boy first discovering the stars and planets overhead.
“If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life,” Griffin told this magazine in an article last spring. “I always just did what I loved and it was leading in this direction.”
Storyteller
 A fellow who has long billed himself as “the hardest-working man in the periphery of show business” made it out of the periphery in 2007. His name is David Paterson, B.A. 1989, and “Bridge to Terabithia,” the movie he produced and co-wrote the screenplay for, was an international hit, earning more than $200 million and getting nominated for a British Academy Award for best children’s movie.
The movie is based on the children’s novel of the same name, which has sold 10 million copies. That 1977 novel, written by Paterson’s mother, Katherine, tells a fictionalized version of what happened to David Paterson when he was 7 years old and lost his best friend to an accidental death.
A longtime television/stage actor and a playwright who has published 15 plays, he wrote, directed and produced the critically acclaimed 2005 film “Love, Ludlow,” whose script was nominated for the Humanitas Prize. That award is given to films that “affirm the human person, probe the meaning of life, and enlighten the use of human freedom.”
The “hardest-working” label may still be true, even if he’s no longer on the periphery of show business. He’s busy marketing his screenplays — adaptations of his own plays and his mother’s best-selling novels — to Hollywood movie studios, aiming to be both the screenwriter and director of his films in order to maintain creative control. He jokes that he hasn’t been seen as important enough to meet with the studios’ “yes” people, but is still meeting with the “maybe” people — who are actually pretty much “no” people unless they hear about an idea that looks like a sure bet to become a mega hit.
Not to worry, though. Paterson suffered through 14 years of “no’s” trying to get “Bridge to Terabithia” made. He’s not about to give up.
TV News Headliner
 Rosanna Scotto, B.F.A. 1980, is the co-anchor of the most popular 10 p.m. newscast in the Big Apple. She has won three New York City Emmy awards for her work. And she has even been paid the ultimate backhanded compliment: being parodied on “Saturday Night Live” for what she calls her “emotional, energetic” style of presenting the news.
While a drama student at CUA, Scotto was torn between a career in acting and broadcast journalism. Halfway through her undergraduate years, however, she says, “I realized I didn’t have the guts to be an actor, with all the auditions and waiting on tables.
“Certainly, though, my theater background has helped me as a co-anchor, because, whether you want to believe it or not, you are performing every night when you do the news. You have to make it interesting, otherwise people aren’t going to watch.”
Her theater background has helped her in a more direct way, as well: She has guest-starred in a dozen TV shows and movies, always playing a newscaster. Her meatiest role and most pivotal character was in Mel Gibson’s 1996 movie “Ransom.”
After graduating, Scotto landed an entry-level job typing the sports scores and other text that appeared on the TV screen during newscasts of the Turner Broadcasting System station WTBS in Atlanta. She quickly worked her way up to become a reporter, and then moved back to her hometown of New York City, where, in 1994, she began her current role as co-anchor of the FOX 5 News broadcasts.
She juggles many responsibilities: She is the mother of two teenagers and the wife of CUA alum Louis Ruggiero (B.A. 1981), co-owns and co-manages (with her mother and siblings) the Midtown restaurant Fresco by Scotto, headlines events for charities that serve at-risk youths and children with disabilities, and does monthly cooking demonstrations on “The Today Show.”
What is she most proud of professionally? “That I’ve been able to help people,” she says. “When you’re able to do a story that actually helps a person — such as someone who can’t get an operation because of bureaucratic bungling or someone who has been imprisoned for many years and has now been shown to be innocent — that’s life-changing.”
To nominate fellow alumni for an Alumni Achievement Award next year, call CUA’s alumni office at 202-319-5608.
A Special Award for Father Bob
 CUA’s director of campus ministry and university chaplain, Rev. Robert Schlageter, O.F.M. Conv., will also receive an award on April 12. He’ll be honored with the Frank A. Kuntz ’07 Award, which recognizes the “unsung heroes” of the CUA community. Father Bob has served as CUA’s campus ministry director for 10 years and, in the words of Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., CUA’s president, has “virtually transformed the faith life of thousands of students here by making campus ministry a university priority.”
This academic year has also seen Father Bob being honored by Pope Benedict XVI with a prestigious Benemerenti Medal, which was instituted in 1832 by Pope Gregory XVI to reward long and exceptional service to the Church. Father O’Connell presented the medal to Father Bob at a Dec. 20 Mass in Caldwell Chapel.
 A Maestro of Multimillion Dollar Relief
Ken Hackett to Receive Gibbons Medal
“Trust the Troops.” Those are the words printed on a sign displayed prominently on the office bookcase of Ken Hackett, president
of Catholic Relief Services. He says he tries to take the advice literally — trusting the decisions and insights of his 5,000 global staff members as he oversees the organization’s efforts to alleviate hunger, disease and injustice around the world.
Catholic Relief Services operates as an arm of the U.S. Catholic Church to provide emergency relief, agricultural assistance, health care and education to needy people in the world’s poorest countries. One of the five largest private relief and development agencies in the world, CRS has an annual budget of $600 million and works in more than 100 countries. Hackett has visited all of them in his more than 30 years with the agency, the last 14 as its president.
During CUA’s commencement ceremonies on May 17, Hackett will receive the James Cardinal Gibbons Medal, the CUA Alumni Association’s highest honor, bestowed annually on an individual who exhibits distinguished service to the nation, the Roman Catholic Church and/or The Catholic University of America.
Among humanitarian agencies, Catholic Relief Services has a reputation for being one of the first to go in and one of the last to leave in dangerous overseas situations. It also has a reputation for excellent fiscal management. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives CRS an A-plus rating for financial efficiency and transparency, and Smart Money magazine has ranked it among the most efficient international relief agencies.
Hackett sets the example for frugality. He buys his own cars used and drives them into the ground, and his colleagues say he once resisted purchasing a new computer for his office even though his old one needed to be rebooted three times before it would work.
His role in the organization, he says, is “orchestra leader. I don’t play anything. All I do is set the stage, organize the talented musicians and wave the baton to get them started, then turn around and accept the applause at the end.”
He gets the applause that the organization’s staff members deserve, he says. But his colleagues speak of Hackett’s signal accomplishments: He is the visionary leader who in 1993 painted the picture of how the agency could increase its funding from $250 million per year to more than $500 million per year — and then he helped bring the vision to pass. Hackett has also led the organization — in the wake of the 1994 Rwanda genocide — to focus on promoting social justice and not just the provision of agricultural assistance and other necessities.
Before he became president, Hackett says, “We tended to see our organization as a relief and development agency that happened to be associated with the Catholic Church. One of the most important things I’ve overseen in my tenure is recovering and re-emphasizing our Catholic mission. We’re an organization of the Catholic Church that exhibits what it is to be Catholic: and that is to express love and concern for the dignity of individuals around the world.”
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