Service: a grain silo, 46 thrift stores and 6.6 million volunteer hours

The Church built Welfare Square in the Depression, under president Heber J. Grant, and it still describes the place as the flagship of its welfare program. The complex holds the grain silo, orchards, a dairy processing plant, a cannery, a bakery, a thrift store, an employment office and the largest of the Church's bishops' storehouses, which are warehouses where a bishop can send a family for groceries instead of cash. Fast offerings from local congregations pay for it: members skip two meals on the first Sunday of each month and give at least what the food would have cost. The stated principles are personal responsibility, thrift and work, which in practice means a family that receives help may be asked to put in hours at the cannery. Most of the buildings were rebuilt between 1997 and 2001; the 1940 granary was left largely as it was. The Utah legislature marked the welfare system's 75th anniversary in 2011.

Every job in a local congregation, from the person who teaches the six-year-olds to the bishop who runs the ward, is a calling: a position extended by a priesthood leader, put to the congregation for a sustaining vote, and conferred by the laying on of hands. Nobody applies for one and nobody is paid for one. Bishops serve four to seven years, preside over the Sunday meetings, interview members for temple recommends, oversee tithing and fast offerings, and decide who gets help from the storehouse. Stake presidents oversee several wards; Mitt Romney's years as Boston Stake president, 1986 to 1994, ran to 30 hours a week on top of Bain Capital. The Church's own teaching on the subject leans on Matthew 25:40 and on a line that reads like a management memo: "One true key to happiness is to labor for the happiness of others." The instruction on attitude comes from J. Reuben Clark, a Church leader of the 1930s, and members quote it when a new calling is not the one they wanted.

"In the service of the Lord, it is not where you serve but how." J. Reuben Clark

The thrift stores are the part of the system you can walk into. Deseret Industries was founded in August 1938, the same year as Welfare Square, and by 2026 ran 46 stores in eight western states: Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington and Texas. The stores sell donated goods, and the point is the staff rather than the stock. The people behind the counters are called associates, they are there because a physical, emotional or social barrier keeps them out of the ordinary job market, and the training position is capped at 18 months with no health coverage or retirement plan, because the aim is to move them into private-sector work rather than keep them. A furniture factory in Salt Lake City supplements the donations. Revenue beyond costs goes to other welfare programs, and stock that does not sell is shipped abroad as humanitarian relief. A bishop can also send someone to a store after a fire or flood for clothes and furniture at no charge.

Since 2022 the Church has published a yearly report called Caring for Those in Need. The figures below are the Church's own, and they bundle humanitarian aid with welfare, self-reliance programs and volunteer service; an independent analysis, the Widow's Mite Report, estimated pure humanitarian spending at $650 million for 2024 against the Church's $1.45 billion total, so read the columns as the Church counting everything it counts.

The 2023 report also counted 11,368 welfare and self-reliance missionaries, more than 110,000 people in self-reliance classes, 2,926 addiction-recovery meetings a week, more than 5,530 people placed in jobs, $8.7 million to the American Red Cross and a $44 million hunger pledge across 30 countries. The 2024 report listed 591 food-security projects, 267 clean-water projects and a $55.8 million child-nutrition program in 12 countries. Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé, who runs the temporal side of the Church, wrote in the 2024 report: "For me, one of the most sacred aspects of serving as Presiding Bishop is the responsibility to organize temporal relief."

The executives in the profiles translate this in two ways, and the first is the obvious one: they keep doing it. M. Anthony Burns was chief executive of Ryder System, the truck-leasing company, from January 1983, and was a bishop in Miami when Hurricane Andrew came through in August 1992; the American Red Cross made him its humanitarian of the year for what his ward did afterward. Robert C. Gay spent 16 years as a managing director at Bain Capital, co-founded the micro-credit organization Unitus in 2001, ran the Church's Ghana Accra Mission from 2004 to 2007 with responsibility for Sierra Leone and Liberia as well, and in September 2012 was made chairman of the Church's Perpetual Education Fund, which lends to students in poor countries. Jon Huntsman Sr. gave $10 million in 1993 and $100 million in 1995 to found a cancer institute and said that apart from family and faith no cause mattered more to him. David Neeleman handed his entire 2002 JetBlue salary and bonus, $290,000, to a fund for crew members in trouble.

The second translation is about how they run a company. Bill Marriott, looking back on his two years as a bishop (1975-1977), said the calling "gave me more empathy" for what his employees were dealing with at home, and called it an anchor in hard times. His father had put the same idea in operating terms decades earlier: "You've got to make your employees happy. If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy." The Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii is the institutional version, a nonprofit that opened on October 12, 1963, draws about 700,000 visitors a year, and staffs 70 percent of its 1,300 jobs with Brigham Young University-Hawaii students, more than 12,000 of whom it has helped pay for school. Whether a person who spent five years running a congregation for free makes a better manager is a question the record cannot settle. That they have done a great deal of unpaid management by the time they reach the corner office is not in doubt.