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 serves as the Director of Spiritual Care at Mass General Brigham, where she leads a dedicated team of chaplains providing compassionate support to more than 1,100 patients across Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Faulkner Hospital in Boston. In this role, she is responsible for providing pastoral accompaniment that honors the diverse beliefs, values and needs of patients and families during times of vulnerability and healing.

Sheila has spent her life reaching out to people across a wide spectrum of regions, bringing compassion and dedication to each setting she serves. Early in her career, she worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Southeast Asia as an English as a Second Language teacher, supporting displaced individuals and families in building new pathways forward. She was later awarded a fellowship from the Open Society Foundation, where she helped develop some of the first investment banks in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union, contributing to educational and economic renewal during a time of significant transition. From there she worked in refugee resettlement in Bosnia, helping to integrate a new population of people into the social and economic fabric of the United States.

Her commitment to service has continued through extensive work with incarcerated and underserved populations. Sheila has volunteered with the Massachusetts Department of Correction and the Massachusetts State Hospital System as both an instructor and chaplain, and remains actively engaged in accompanying incarcerated individuals in their pursuit of healing and wholeness. In addition to spending years tutoring struggling readers in the New Haven, Boston and Belmont public school systems build confidence and skills, she remains committed to parish life as a lector and Eucharistic Minister.

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.