UPDATE on Partners:
What Do We Know?
by Tuomi Forrest, Associate Director
Over the past twenty years, Partners’ identity as an
organization has grown from its unique “intellectual capital.”
This capital is nothing more, or less, than our ever-evolving
understanding of what congregations do in two key areas: 1)
how they use their many assets, including their buildings, to
benefit the community, nurture social capital, and sustain
neighborhoods; and 2) how they raise funds, especially
from the wider public, to support building restoration. And,
importantly, we look at how these topics interrelate.
The threads of these two subjects weave together for most
successful congregations living out their mission in older
and historic sacred places. They also serve as a leitmotif to
Partners’ own history, and point to where we will go in the
future.
Our first publication, the Complete Guide to Capital Campaigns
for Historic Churches and Synagogues, created one niche for
us. The Guide is the only such book focused on historic
buildings that teaches congregations to raise funds from both
members and the wider public. It helps congregations create
a strong case for support by documenting both their cultural
importance and their community service.
In the mid-1990s Partners created Sacred Places at Risk, the
first national research project to scientifically document
the “public value” of sacred places – the human, financial,
space and other resources a congregation gives to support the
myriad programs that serve the public, ranging from soup
kitchens to mentoring for teens, from concerts to job training.
Partners translated the groundbreaking methodology of
the study (developed in partnership with researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania) into the book Your Sacred Place is a
Community Asset: A Tool Kit to Attract New Resources and Partners,
and then used the Tool Kit and the Guide as core resources for
New Dollars/New Partners for Your Sacred Place training, now our
core national program.
The research also helped inform the larger national
conversation about the role of faith organizations in public
life, and how the public sector could support sacred places,
leading to, among other things, opening up the national “Save
America’s Treasures” funding to active houses of worship.
That arc of thinking and discovery has helped create the
Partners we know today, but there’s always more to learn.
In the course of developing New Dollars we unearthed dozens
of stories of congregations that had successfully raised funds
from the wider public for building restoration. In the past
six years, these stories have been duplicated many times by
graduates of the training.
5 • Sacred Places • www.sacredplaces.org • Spring 2010
Since joining Partners in
1997, Tuomi Forrest has
contributed to numerous
Partners publications, is a
lead designer and trainer
for Partners' New Dollars/
New Partners program,
and currently oversees all
of Partners' programming
efforts, including the
development of regional
offices and grant funds.
But what are we learning from these successes? We have
the opportunity and the duty to learn more, to dig deeper.
How does it really affect congregational life – lay and clergy
leadership, membership, relations with its neighbors,
its collective self-understanding – when a congregation
organizes and acts to raise funds in a new way?
Recently, the Rev. Rodger Broadley wrote to us after his
parish completed the New Dollars training and subsequently
embarked on a capital campaign, “this entire project has
had a deep spiritual and profound communal impact on our
congregation. Leadership, cooperation, and collaboration
have been developed at every level. Creative partnerships
with traditional stakeholders and an emerging group of
friends and neighbors have been entered into.”
Done well, the work that Partners helps congregations
undertake can have far-reaching positive effects on almost
all aspects of its life. But we know it is not always a straight
or easy path. More of these stories – with all their nuances
and points of view – can and should be told, deepening and
broadening the type of information we first presented in the
Guide.
We also have a new opportunity to expand the Sacred Places
at Risk research. By exploring the complex and interrelated
ways a congregation impacts its immediate community, we
can discover the “halo effect” it has on the local economy
(spending and job creation), property values, public safety,
and social service provision. Over two years ago, Partners
began to identify the range of factors that could be studied.
We called together several academic researchers to talk
over our approach and all agreed that the questions we were
asking had not been thoroughly or comprehensively studied.
They confirmed that Partners’ proposed research would
require a more interdisciplinary approach than Sacred Places
at Risk, and could produce powerful and influential findings.
We expect to pilot this methodology in Philadelphia, and
depending upon the results, conduct a larger research
project.
What we know is always unfolding, but for certain it will both
deepen and broaden our – and our society’s – understanding
of the dynamics within congregations and between a
congregation and its community. Most importantly, this
knowledge, though never perfect, will help us serve sacred
places more effectively.