UPDATE on Partners:
The Philadelphia
Regional Fund
Exemplars Project
Since its groundbreaking Sacred Places at Risk study was
published in 1998, Partners for Sacred Places has made the
case for the quantity and diversity of community services
and programs that congregations provide. Now, with an
increasing recognition of the need to articulate the quality
of those programs as well, Partners staff has launched the
Exemplars Project with funding from the William Penn
Foundation. This initiative seeks to identify, spotlight, and
call attention to congregation-hosted programs and social
services that are particularly innovative, affordable and
effective.
The recommendations from the project’s working group
and the resultant profile pieces—on programs ranging
from Broad Street Ministry’s Breaking Bread program
to Neighborhood Bike Works at St. Mary’s, Hamilton
Village—will help to support Partners’ ongoing advocacy
efforts with government officials and civic leaders. See
facing page for the profile of Kinder Academy, hosted by
Bustleton United Methodist Church.
Commercial Corridors Project
Partners continues to convene two coalitions of
congregations and organizations along Baltimore and
Germantown Avenues, hosting conversations and helping
to define goals for the revitalization of these commercial
corridors. Each group has begun to implement the projects
that were supported by seed grants from the Preservation
Alliance for Greater Philadelphia in May—a Baltimore
Avenue Venue Menu which will list congregation space
available for community use, and “Germantown Speaks,”
an intergenerational series of events in which local high
school students will collect oral histories of Germantown
from older residents.
Philadelphia Regional Fund for
Sacred Places Advisory Committee
The Rev. Dr. Roy G. Almquist
Charles B. Casper, Esq.
Julia Chapman
J. Randall Cotton
Helen Cunningham
Scott Doyle
James Flaherty
Dr. Ira Harkavy
Mark Alan Hughes
Emanuel Kelly, FAIA
James Kise, AIA
Catherine Lynch
Dr. Roger Moss
Anne Pizzoli
The Rev. Aidan Rooney, C.M.
Michael Stern
Monica Taylor
Frank Vagnone
Geraldine Wang
Eric Wilden
David Winkowski
7 • Sacred Places • www.sacredplaces.org • Fall 2009
Detail of St. Marks Episcopal Church, a new
Philadelphia Fund grantee.
The design process for the Venue Menu is currently
underway, with publication planned for late 2009;
“Germantown Speaks” community events were held at
multiple sites throughout Germantown in November.
Capital Grants
This was a productive summer for the Philadelphia
Regional Fund’s grantees, with seven congregations
completing their grant-funded projects in recent months.
To date, thirteen grants from the Fund have been fully
disbursed, with thirteen projects still underway.
In September 2009, the Fund’s Grant Review Panel met
to evaluate this year’s applications and determine awards.
Congratulations go to the newest congregations that the
Fund is proud to support: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church of
Chestnut Hill ($62,500 for roofing and masonry repairs);
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church ($62,500 for masonry
repairs and restoration); the Church of St. James the Less
($40,000 for roof repairs); and Temple Beth Zion-Beth
Israel ($35,000 for roof truss repairs).
Training
Three special rounds of New Dollars training are taking
place in the Philadelphia area: a Presbyterian class
of training will be sponsored by the Presbytery of
Philadelphia; a round will be sponsored by the Eastern
Pennsylvania United Methodist Conference; and the
Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia will cohost a third round which focuses on African-American
congregations, and includes a supplementary module
designed to help them nominate their significant
buildings to the National Register. The next round of
interfaith training is expected to start in the winter or
spring of 2010.