Sanctae Crucis Award Winners 2026

Tom O’Brien has been the Director of Neighborhood Connections since 2007. During his tenure, Neighborhood Connections has distributed over $20 million in grants to grassroots groups and organizations throughout Cleveland and East Cleveland, Ohio. 

Neighborhood Connections has expanded its work from being strictly a grant maker to working with residents, grassroots groups, community-based organizations, and institutions. Its goal is to reweave the social fabric in communities, build trusting relationships, develop collective power to make social change, create opportunities for belonging, connect people with good, timely information, and involve thousands of people in their neighborhoods.

Prior to working at Neighborhood Connections, Tom was a community organizer in Cleveland’s Broadway-Slavic Village neighborhood for five years, working with residents to effect change on systemic issues in their neighborhood and bridge relationships across racial lines. He also worked to end capital punishment through the Cleveland Coalition Against the Death Penalty and on several political campaigns. In addition, he worked for three years with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps as an Area Director in Portland, Oregon, and taught and coached at the high school and junior high school levels in Connecticut and Texas.

Sheila Cavanaugh is the Director of Spiritual Care at MassGeneral Brigham, where she leads a team of chaplains serving more than 1,100 patients at Brigham and Women’s and Faulkner Hospitals in Boston. She also serves as a volunteer chaplain in the Massachusetts State Hospital System, where she accompanies incarcerated patients on their journey to healing and wholeness.

Cavanaugh maintains the perspective that her professional life is a vehicle to uplift and care for others, grounded in Jesuit principles.

She has worked to help others both domestically and internationally, serving with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Southeast Asia, earning an Open Society Fellowship in the former Soviet Union, and working in refugee resettlement from Bosnia to the United States.

Maryclaire Dale is a longtime legal affairs writer for The Associated Press and a 2018 Nieman Fellow and adjunct at Harvard. Her career has taken her from the West Virginia coalfields to a Caribbean murder trial to the sexual assault trials of Catholic priests and actor Bill Cosby. Her work unsealing Cosby’s testimony in a confidential deposition led to his 2015 arrest and two criminal trials.

Dale has also closely covered the $1B NFL concussion settlement, publishing a 2021 investigation of race bias in dementia testing that led to more than $100M in new awards and benefits for Black players. And her 2021 story on the lax prosecution of campus rapes aired in print and TV markets around the world, from Seoul to Tehran, and helped one woman seek justice.

She has appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show," “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “The Takeaway,” the BBC, and other news programs. She contributed to the AP's coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, reporting from Butler, Pa., which was a Pulitzer finalist for Breaking News in 2024. 

Community, justice, and a commitment to analysis are the three ideas that have shaped Klofas’ personal and professional life. 

Klofas is an active member of his Rochester, New York community. He was extensively involved in efforts to reduce violence in the community and to address a local epidemic of opioid use and its related deaths. He also wrote a column addressing these local issues for a highly-regarded community newspaper. 

Along with local projects, John also served as a team member for a multi-year nationwide anti-violence project under the U.S. Department of Justice. With a broadened view of justice, John continues to serve on a team addressing court-ordered reform in policing. That work has involved six major police agencies across the country.  

John has an extensive record of research and publications in the field of criminal justice. He founded the student-centered research center at Rochester Institute of Technology, the Center for Public Safety Initiatives (CPSI), which researches, analyzes, and promotes strategies that advance safety, justice, and crime reduction.