Roles and profiles seems like a good answer for what I need to do.  The problem is I don't quite get how it is decided that record belongs to a particular role.  It is clear that if a user creates it -- that record belongs to them and rules around roles should apply.  That seems to work great but I have a where I want to load data from a spreadsheet that belongs to several roles == ie managers of different departments should end up being responsible for the record going forward.  -- How do i indicate that the record that was just imported belongs a particular user who is a member of a role.  

Here are our roles   The foundation chair needs to see all of the records and each of district Chairs should only see the records belong to their district. Unfortunately -- the Foundation Chair is likely to create records which should belong to one of the region chairs -- How can we now associate that particular region chair role with a record created by the Foundation chair?  So only the right people can see it.