Piloting the Large “Economic Halo”
Approach
In the wake of Sacred Places at Risk it became clear that Partners’
research, while highly influential, had not captured the larger impact that
congregations have on the economic life of their communities. In 2010
Partners joined with Cnaan once again, and began to lay out a more
comprehensive approach to capturing the full impact that congregations
have on their local economies. Partners developed and carried out a pilot
project that factored in the value of green space and trees, building
projects, visitors to the local community, support for local business and
vendors, budget and taxes, and the congregation’s role as an incubator for
new businesses or nonprofits, among other factors.
Partners piloted a study with 12 Philadelphia congregations occupying
houses of worship that were at least 50 years old. The pilot enabled Partners
and Cnaan to test a variety of approaches that would monetize each
element of a congregation’s economic impact; overall, Partners concluded
that this approach was feasible, though still in need of fine-tuning. The
results of the study were presented in an article (“If you do not count it, it
does not count: a pilot study of valuing urban congregations”) published in
the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion, a scholarly, peerreviewed publication.
From Pilot to Three-City Study
Given the pilot’s promising findings, Partners and Cnaan collaborated
again to enlarge the research sample and extend its reach, by 1) greatly
increasing the number of congregations studied; 2) selecting congregations
at random from the larger universe of historic sacred places; and 3)
expanding the scope geographically to three cities: Fort Worth, Chicago,
and Philadelphia.
For this report, Partners and Cnaan also decided not to monetize or
assign numerical value to four areas that were addressed in the pilot:
• Housing values and crime rates, given the complexity and difficulty
of gathering and analyzing this data in a given neighborhood .
• Impact on individual lives and families (such as suicide prevention
or marriage preservation), given the difficulty of substantiating
information received from congregational members and attaching
dollar values.
• Community development and incubation of nonprofit or business
organizations.
• Certain environmental values (e.g., cleaning the air, reducing water
run-off).
For a fuller discussion of the research methodology, see
Appendix A of this report.
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