The Acacia Group co-founder Faye Sonier has lived through life’s hardest lesson in how even the crisis of terminal illness can be transformed into fresh commitment for holy work.

Her beloved husband and business partner, Albertos Polizogopoulos, was diagnosed with glioblastoma – in lay language, fatal brain cancer – in September, 2020. Sustained by their Christian faith and the encouragement of supportive friends, the couple went ahead with launching Acacia three months later in January, 2021. Their vision for the law firm thrived as Albertos stabilized and survived until May 9, 2024.

Faye doesn’t sugarcoat the gruelling emotional toll of enduring the progressive disease, especially after the tumors returned inescapably in September 2023. But she points to the way the life and law firm partners were able to turn grim reality into a catalyst for deeper relationships within the family, with friends, and with Acacia’s clients.

“We realized in January, 2024 that we wouldn’t be able to hold back the disease’s progression, and that Albertos only had months,” she says. “We had decided early that if Albertos needed palliative care, we would do that at home. So, Todd (Anderson), who became our general manager and (was) Albertos’ best friend, set up my office at the foot of Albertos’ hospital bed in our master bedroom. I worked there every day over the course of his palliative care period.”

The arrangement, however unorthodox, offered continuity with what Faye and Albertos had already discovered: working at home fostered a rich time for family life. “It permitted us to work together, and it permitted us to work from home with our kids. We (are) a homeschooling family so the children were with us around the clock, and we basically got to spend our days together.”

Even in the face of grievous distress, the fundamental and founding vision of Acacia was flourishing.

“Albertos’ vision was to bring together all his friends to serve our clients (because) the relationship we have with many of them is not just solicitor-client. We’ve worked with some of them for 10 to 15 years on religious freedom issues, on sanctity of life issues. We’ve seen them in courtrooms but also in restaurants, at conferences together, in our home. It’s more of a friendship, labouring together as brothers and sisters in Christ while we move forward and do our work.”

That pulse of togetherness comes from Acacia’s heart and soul. Unlike most conventional law practices, it offers in-house communications advice, fundraising counselling, and governance guidance, as integral complements to its strictly legal services. About 90 per cent of the firm’s clients are churches and charities, Faye notes, meaning they tend to be smaller organizations that have neither the financial resources nor the time to shop around for separate assistance.

“We can help them communicate in their statements of faith, their policies and governance documents, their theological basis, why they exist, and how they want to express their faith in a community,” Faye says.

“We’re also hoping to add in the next year or two a governance coaching division where we not only prepare the bylaws and the resolutions to help with internal compliance issues or policies, but also to teach boards of small or medium sized charities how to organize and run in a really healthy way,” she adds.

Part of the intention for such training, which is already being developed, is to help boards train successive boards so that “good practices” become templates that are in place if and when crisis hits.

“You don’t want to realize when you’re in a crisis that the house isn’t in order. You want the house in order for the health of the organization, but also so you know where you stand if a crisis unfortunately comes up.”

Faye stresses that the goal of Acacia isn’t to make decisions for institutional leaders. It’s to help them make decisions for themselves, equipped with professional, practical counsel on the law, on communication, on fundraising, and ultimately governance itself.

Its motto since the firm’s founding, she points out, has been “Our ministry is to help you lead yours.” Someone with a background in communications tried to talk Albertos out of using the word “ministry” and substitute “mission” instead. But he, renowned for delighting in loud and entertaining debate, stood his ground on “ministry” as key to Acacia’s meaning.

She recalls getting a taste herself of how firm her husband and business partner could be on the particularities about Acacia’s work, even from his palliative care bed in the makeshift master bedroom office. He had been sleeping all day as Faye worked on a particularly complex legal file.

“He was sleeping soundly, so I spent that day working in the adjacent office and periodically going in to check on him. At the end of the day, I went back to finish the work at the foot of the bed, and he woke up just long enough to say ‘I didn’t like that. Don’t do it that way again.’ Then he fell back to sleep.”

It was more than just lawyerly attention to details that could come back to bite if not done right. It was a reminder that Acacia’s work is, in its essence, holy work being carried out within the circle of God’s faithful. Even as Albertos fell into his final sleep, the lesson absorbed was to carry that work, in that spirit, forward.

“Our whole vision is to support churches and charities in serving their communities well,” Faye says. “Our faith-based clientele is looking for professionals who not only do good work but understand their community, their language, their tone and timbre, their founding principles, their Biblical beliefs.”

Peter Stockland leads the Strategic Communications division at The Acacia Group and is the author of The Acacia Arc newsletter. He has decades of experience as a Canadian journalist, including as editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, vice-president of English language magazines for Reader’s Digest Canada, and Publisher of the Catholic Register. Peter also enjoys writing short-stories and other fiction, which have been featured in numerous publications across Canada.