Sacred Places Summer 2014 | Page 7

To help facilitate these changes, Partners worked with the parish leadership to develop a job description for a new position, Outreach and Development Coordinator. This individual will be repsonsible for identifying new funding opportunities and building strategic relationships with St. Francis’ stakeholders in the neighborhood, the city, and across the country. As St. Francis looks toward its future – and the future of the community that it calls home – the parish strives to identify and implement innovative strategies to sustain its presence, increase its value to the community, and restore its buildings so that they can provide space to serve parishioners and neighbors. And finally, at Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion, in the heart of Center City, Partners suggested pulling together a group of members to serve on a diaspora task force, which is a necessary pre-requisite to launching a successful capital campaign. A team of three to five individuals, including longstanding members of the church, as well as others who have relevant experience in research and outreach, were responsible for identifying, reaching out to, and cultivating relationships with the church’s diaspora, which included individuals or couples that had been married, baptized, or confirmed in the church and descendants of prominent members and faith leaders