In When Doing Good Isn’t Good Enough, Suzanne Toton examines Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) organizational transformation in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The book centers on CRS, the international relief and development agency of the US Catholic community, showing how the genocide prompted deep reflection and engaged staff across the globe to reshape the organization around a commitment to justice and solidarity.

The book is organized around this process of institutional change and how it was applied in various contexts, including within the United States. Toton first outlines the “compelling need to change” (p. 4) and how CRS engaged staff in both developing and rolling out its new strategy and operating ethos—or “Justice Lens” (p. 30). The core of the book consists of three cases of how CRS applied its new approach in emergency response, recovery, and development programming. The cases include CRS’ peace and justice programming in Rwanda after the genocide, stakeholder coordination and advocacy on the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, and a revised partnership model after Hurricane Mitch in Honduras. Collectively, the cases demonstrate how a values-based framework informs decision-making and organizational practice in diverse ways. The book also highlights how a commitment to justice fostered a deeper emphasis on solidarity and ultimately strengthened CRS’ engagement with US-based constituencies, including parishes, schools, and universities, and government actors. Here, Toton provides a firsthand perspective from her own work coordinating the partnership between CRS and Villanova University. This section illustrates how organizational change extended beyond internal strategy to reshape relationships with external actors. Through the book’s structure, Toton traces how CRS translated an abstract commitment to justice into concrete organizational practices across wide programmatic, geographic, and institutional domains.

I approached this book as both a practitioner and a scholar. I have worked for CRS for over two decades, joining the organization shortly after the period examined in the book. I am also conducting doctoral research on organizational adaptation in periods of crisis. This dual positionality shaped my interest in Toton’s interpretation of CRS’ experience.

Toton is an adept storyteller, translating complex institutional processes and historical developments into a coherent account accessible to readers beyond the organization itself. She weaves together voices from a range of CRS stakeholders, showcasing how broad organizational transformation is challenging, yet can yield rewarding results. As a result, the book is likely to be engaging not only for those familiar with CRS but also for practitioners, students, and scholars interested in organizational learning and values-driven adaptation. Organizations seeking to learn from comparable processes of institutional change will find the narrative both approachable and useful, offering insights that can be thoughtfully considered and adapted across diverse settings.

At the same time, the book is anchored in a defined historical period, covering CRS’ strategic transformation from the mid-1990s through a major strategic planning event in 2000. The book does not include a concluding chapter or afterword to reflect how this strategic shift evolved in subsequent decades or how CRS later assessed the long-term consequences of its commitment to justice and solidarity. While this approach enables a focused historical account, it also limits the book’s engagement with the markedly different operating environment facing third sector organizations today. Recent scholarship highlights increasing pressures on civil society organizations, including heightened aid dependency, shrinking civic space, and intensified scrutiny. In contrast, the period examined in Toton’s book reflects a context in which NGOs often had greater latitude to experiment and innovate. Furthermore, the three cases presented are drawn from predominantly Catholic contexts, arguably facilitating CRS’ ability to influence justice-oriented change. A more explicit discussion of how the Justice Lens might translate to more constrained environments, or of the limits of transferability, would have further strengthened the book’s relevance to current debates.

Toton’s book is oriented toward people interested in organizational change and ethical reflection in international development. CRS’ former President, Ken Hackett, and former staff, Christine Tucker, contribute the foreword and afterword, respectively, underscoring the book’s close engagement with practice. While this practitioner orientation is a strength, the text might have benefited from more explicit positioning within relevant academic literature. Toton could have drawn upon her experience as a professor of social ethics at Villanova University to engage with scholarship on organizational learning, resilience, or social ethics, providing additional interpretive depth without detracting from the accessibility of the narrative. Nevertheless, Toton’s presentation allows the case to remain open to multiple analytical readings and future scholarly engagement.

The book offers a rich empirical case of organizational transformation within the third sector. Although its primary focus is historical, the themes it raises—ethical reckoning after crisis, participatory strategy formation, and the role of organizational strategy and identity in shaping practice—resonate with broader concerns of the third sector today. Scholars and practitioners interested in values-based organizational change will find the book a useful and thought-provoking resource.

The author declares that she has worked for Catholic Relief Services from 2005 to 2026 and had no professional relationship with the author of the book. This book review was conducted without external funding.