Our Team

Founder

Tom O’Neill has spent over 14 years working for the Catholic Church and nonprofits dedicated to life, marriage and family, and religious liberty. Currently, he serves as the Assistant to the President for Special Projects at Divine Mercy University where he leads strategic planning initiatives and assists with the creation of new programs.

Prior to his current role, Tom served as the Deputy Director for Strategic Relations & Training at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). In this role he helped conceive and organize a national, ecumenical effort around the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court case. This involved the USCCB, ADF, and the Family Research Council collaborating to create a prayer and communications campaign that reached 17,000+ pro-life leaders. He also led recruitment efforts at several law schools for a summer leadership program; mentored two teams of 10 students discussing law, philosophy, and spirituality; and he designed a retreat for 30 team members dedicated to strategic planning and team culture.

Tom also spent 11 years working directly for the Catholic Church – first at the Diocese of Arlington, VA, then in the Diocese of Harrisburg, PA. Tom created many new programs and initiatives dedicated to evangelization and apologetics during this time.

In Harrisburg, Tom created a committee of converts to Catholicism to discuss why people enter the Church. He also led visits to 50 parishes and analyzed 20 years of data to create a report on evangelization for the Bishop of Harrisburg. While in this role, he also created a network of 35 Catholic mental health professionals to discuss how to apply a Catholic anthropology to their work. He also created a network of Mid-Atlantic Family Life Directors (from Trenton, NJ to Richmond, VA) to collaborate and support one another.

In Arlington, he created the diocesan Men’s Conference (1,100 attendees) which hosted speakers such as Justice Antonin Scalia, Dr. Peter Kreeft, Rev. Thomas Joseph White, OP, and Curtis Martin. He also created a debate series on apologetics, “The Devil’s Advocate”, which featured Catholic experts debating serious challenges to the Church. He personally debated Rev. Paul Scalia, Rev. Thomas Joseph White, OP, and Dr. Robert Wilken.

Tom has worked with development teams, senior clergy, boards of directors, and academics throughout his career. He has developed and managed budgets in every position he’s held, most recently totalling more than $11M. Tom is also seasoned in nonprofit development and has written proposals for foundations and major donors that raised $2.5M and worked with a direct mail team to raise $1.2M.

Tom graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia with a BA in religious studies and a minor in psychology. He focused on the philosophy of religion and wrote his senior thesis on Stephen C. Pepper, whose work influenced Thomas Kuhn. He received an MA in the philosophy of religion from the University of Chicago, where he studied relativism and absolutism in epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. He later earned a certificate in Catholic dogmatic theology from the Christendom Graduate School of Theology.

He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and children.