Sacred Places Spring 2010 | Page 6

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.