Grantmaker Roundtable
Faith-Based Grantmaking

On October 17, 2000, Regina McGraw, editor of NFG Reports and Executive Director of the Wieboldt Foundation, and four NFG members met to discuss the accomplishments and challenges of their faith-based grantmaking. Jeannie Appleman, Executive Director of Interfaith Funders; Ed King, Jr., Program Officer at the Jessie Ball duPont Fund; Linetta Gilbert, Vice President for Programs at the Greater New Orleans Foundation; and Michele Prichard, Special Projects Director at the Liberty Hill Foundation, participated in the discussion. At the end of this interview are selected resources for funders interested in examining the opportunities and challenges of faith-based funding further.

Index: Types of Grantmaking, Unique Strengths, Who Has the Control?, "Drive-In" Congregations, Developing Leaders, Replacing Public Services, Church/State Separation, Influence on Funding, Faith-Based Grantmaking Resources

Types of Grantmaking

Regina McGraw: What types of faith-based grantmaking are you doing?

Jeannie Appleman: We fund faith-based community organizing, also known as institution-based or congregation-based organizing. It follows a particular methodology, where the organizations are made up largely of congregations, although sometimes they have other partners like schools or unions. Out of the 140 groups in the country doing this work, we've funded 19 and brought $1.37 million in new funding to the field in the last three years.
We identified six challenges in faith-based organizing and fund groups that meet one or more of them. The groups are developing new kinds of relationships and strategic partnerships with other groups, like scholars in an academic context, labor unions or parent-teacher associations. Because most faith-based organizations have been working at a neighborhood or metro level, with our funding and other encouragement, they've been increasing their work state-wide or at regional levels. They're addressing more complex issues such as economic development, urban sprawl and school reform, and are working with new constituencies like immigrants, youth, parents and welfare recipients.

Ed King: We have something called a Religion Initiative. It has a Clergy Enrichment fund, which pastors can tap into for up to $5,000 to take time off, because a lot of pastors are suffering from burnout; a Repair and Restoration fund, money set aside that congregations can apply for to have the buildings they worship in repaired; and the Church Technical Assistance program. A lot of our churches are rural and small and don't have computers, email, Internet access, that sort of thing. We want to provide some money so that they can communicate more effectively and have access to information. We offer a $5,000 grant for any communications equipment, twice every five years. The Initiative, a little over $1 million, doesn't have anything to do with our competitive grants program. We also have our regular grants program, where our congregations come in with proposals and ideas just like the colleges, universities and nonprofits. We fund everything from a CDFI to affordable housing.

Linetta Gilbert: We were the first funder for two congregation-based organizing groups: one is metropolitan-wide and the other still is focusing on the city of New Orleans. We also fund capacity building, and it's really grown over the last seven years. Our community and political leaders wanted to engage everybody in the rebuilding of New Orleans and the region. When faith-based groups started to do community development and get more involved with after-school and other social service programs, they needed good administrative infrastructures. In 1992 we gave our largest grant to a seminary that partnered with another seminary to do the training work. We also fund program development.

The first faith-based groups that came to us in 1989 wanted to work with the Housing Authority of New Orleans in a neighborhood. The program was to empower the residents of a public housing site - that's how we got started. While we've not funded a lot of collaboration yet, we're starting to do that. Under capacity building we've provided scholarships to a lot of people for the best training we can find. Sometimes we've put some dollars aside to bring trainers to New Orleans. We've also underwritten technical assistance, which is given on a more direct basis and to a much smaller group; some work in the arts; and our biggest area of learning and work now is in community economic development. We fund program development, capacity building and some organizing - we helped fund the start-up of the Jeremiah group, an IAF affiliate, and All Congregations Together, a PICO affiliate.

Michele Prichard: We fund organizing work that is faith-based, and secondly and closely related to that, policy advocacy work. The issues have been quite diverse. I was thinking back to the 1980s, when in some ways we did more funding of faith-based work than now. I'm not quite sure what the reasons are, but in the '80s the churches were very active in issues such as peace and disarmament, refugee resettlement and immigrants. In the '90s the issues shifted. We funded economic justice, low-wage worker organizing, living wage and prison reform work. The last issue area is the religious right. Interestingly, mainstream and liberal denominations joined together to try to confront the religious right around issues of tolerance, homophobia and education. So Liberty Hill's two kinds of categorical funding areas are policy advocacy and organizing, but the issues run a wide gambit.

Unique Strengths

Regina: What do you think are the unique or important strengths that faith-based institutions bring to communities?

Ed: They represent safe places for people to gather. The church has always been a place where people in the community and members of the congregation could feel safe. Even during the Civil Rights movement, people felt safe to gather there and discuss issues of concern. Faith-based institutions also bring a certain amount of spiritual capital that most institutions don't offer. And it takes time to build that. There are some churches, some congregations that are a moral light in a community.

They have physical facilities that can be used for so many various activities, buses that can transport the elderly or other people to political rallies. Sometimes, it's amazing to see all of the church vehicles that are used to transport people when they go to City Hall when we fund community organizing events.

Linetta: We find a lot of creativity among the faith-based organizations, even though these are traditional denominations that we're dealing with. They also have great numbers of volunteers, some with broad professional experience. Because we work with denominations whose members reach across socio-economic lines, you'll find people who are CEOs of corporations in the same congregation as people who are trying to get off welfare. So people talk about issues from various perspectives, getting some joint efforts going. Some of our faith communities bring resources and they're fairly free with those resources if they know that in the end there will be some change because they invested in the issue. We are not as rich philanthropically here as other communities are, so when a congregation puts money into something, they really believe in it or they see it as a value for their congregants and for their neighborhoods.

Michele: A lot of what Linetta said rings true for the policy advocacy work of faith-based institutions. Quite frankly, the chief strength that they bring is numbers. Not long ago we gave a grant to the California Church Council so that they could circulate a publication helping voters navigate their way through the 20 different initiatives on the California ballot, from the standpoint of faith.

How would a person of faith screen all of these various issues and understand their impact? We helped with some funding to get that out to a larger number of people. Today, when many people are disconnected and don't feel much relationship to a civic structure or network, the churches are a huge strength. From the standpoint of meeting needs in the community, these institutions, with all of their volunteer energy, are coming from a place of compassionate concern about the "have nots."

Jeannie: I'd echo what both have said and add a few things. We feel that these organizations are a locus for diversity - economically, racially, and by age and gender. They often reflect the constituency of their member institutions. I feel they are also revitalizing congregational life, not just affecting issues that the organization chooses to address, like welfare reform. It is a very transformative experience for someone to be a leader in an organization. It can have a huge impact on their congregation. The kind of moral leadership that these organizations provide also can't be underrated, especially given the current context in our country. They harness the energy that comes from shared values, sense of community and other common denominators, and apply that to the issues that they want to address. That's a force that politicians and, increasingly, corporate America can't ignore.

Linetta: When you spoke about new leaders, that's true. We're developing new leaders through the church, they're our partners in our community economic development strategy. Historically, faith-based organizations have produced leaders through their Sunday school, youth development, and financial or administrative structures. As children we learned how to conduct meetings, how to make decisions and how groups come together. In philanthropy, we can help take those principles of leadership, respect for the other's opinion, plain old structure, and encourage that to happen in the broader community. We can't forget that the church comes with so much capacity already. This is a capacity that the church often brings to community development.

Jeannie: And faith-based organizations are reaching out to even more lower-income people than ever before. One of the critiques you hear sometimes is that faith-based organizations are made up of middle-class people. That may be true in some areas, but in my experience very low-income people are becoming central to these organizations.

Linetta: Another thing that we can't forget is that these groups bring stories, real stories. When the faith or lay leaders hear the challenges that people are facing and they talk about them, it helps public policy change and focuses their work on program development. The stories are shared by people that they know, and give a face and name to the statistics.

Who Has the Control?

Regina: One of the criticisms we often hear is that faith-based initiatives are controlled by the clergy and not community leaders. Do you think this is a fair criticism?

Linetta: There are some situations, especially in new faith-based programs, where the clergy really seem to have a tight handle or hold on the initiative. I've been looking at this thing for nine years and the more clergy are exposed to strategies for grooming new leaders, the more they can relax and include additional people in the process. But it is a challenge on lots of levels. Many of the people we fund are very bright, competent people who have been marginalized by their communities. When they are in the leadership, they often mimic the models they've seen in corporate America and other nonprofits, where there's one leader or Executive Director and a board and the leader's telling the board what he's done, as opposed to the board being really engaged. So I don't think they're really very different from other emerging nonprofits in this regard. Some of them get stuck and they need help learning about different models of leadership and how to include more people in the decision making.

Jeannie: In my experience, sometimes a faith-based organizing effort gets started because a clergy in one city has a friend who's a clergy in another city, who says, "you all ought to have an organization like this." So, often a set of clergy will be convened because of the particular leadership role they play within their own religious institutions. They're an entry point and at the very beginning of the formation of these groups they're key. They have access to the pot of money that helps create the organizations. But then you might shortly find that the governing body is primarily made up of lay leaders, often with a clergy caucus that meets separately and is a kind of theological think tank for the organization. I have found that lay leaders play an equal role in a short period of time.

Linetta: What happens with the organizing groups is different from what happens in the program development groups. You've described what happens in the organizing scenario wonderfully. The nonprofit management scenario, especially around community development, can be harder because the vision is stronger. It comes from the pastor. "God gave me the vision, and here it is. This is what we're going to work on." I'm speaking as a funder and as a lay person who's active in my faith, and it doesn't matter the denomination - that's a challenge. It's almost an occupational characteristic. It can be hard for them to move outside of that, into democratization of the vision.

Ed: In some cases, the criticism is well deserved. There are ministers who have the vision and generally this is like their baby, and it's hard to turn it loose. On the other hand, the ministers in the African American community and I presume in other communities, are the ones that give the entire movement legitimacy. If you take the pastors out of the community organizing process, you lose your entry point into the congregations, which is where the power is. We've found that if you can get the pastor motivated, the challenge is giving them the training they need so that they can share their vision and share power, and bring lay persons along. Then they can pass this thing off, because most of their plates are too full. That's why we have our Clergy Enrichment Fund.

"Drive-In" Congregations

Regina: How do you grapple with the fact that for certain congregations, members come from outside the community where it's located. I know that's an issue here in Chicago; is that an issue in Los Angeles?

Michele: In a region like Los Angeles, a policy advocacy issue can be city-wide, region-wide or even state focused. Then I don't think it makes a huge difference if members have moved away from the historic neighborhood congregation and now live in a suburban area, for example. They still return to there for services and feel connected. But for faith-based economic development in the inner city core, it has been very challenging to engage congregational members who have moved on in revitalization efforts.

Jeannie: Many faith-based community organizations are no longer neighborhood-based. Rather, the newer ones are being built as metropolitan-wide from the start. And often the existing neighborhood-based organizations are being linked into larger metropolitan-wide structures. But it begs a bigger question, which is what do you do about issues like regionalism and urban sprawl that are cutting different ways for suburban and inner city congregations. There are many related issues that need to be grappled with, like tax base sharing, job growth, school funding formulas and access to jobs. And people who are involved in organizations with their congregations are there because of several levels of self-interest, not just because of an immediate issue in their own back yard, making it a much murkier and more difficult organizing campaign.

Linetta: For the program development work we don't mind that church members are coming from all over. If the people who are really going to get something from a program are from the neighborhood, they need to be engaged in a meaningful way. In some cases, the church's membership grows because people see it as a community church that's working with them. For our organizing groups, we're doing everything we can do to help people begin to think and talk about common issues and policies - what's keeping us all down? Who are the people who can make a difference on those issues, and how do we organizationally begin to tackle them? Because of the issues of race and class in our region, and I bet it's the same way everywhere in the country, and because of the issues around sprawl, there's a lot of damage control that has to be done to even get the congregations talking with each other.

Ed: I think the problem exists mostly in inner city communities because they have what we call drive-in congregations - people drive in on Sunday, enjoy the worship experience and drive back to the suburbs. I've heard people in the community say, "Oh, that's the church where the people drive in, they don't care anything about us." We try to get our congregations that do ministry and work in the inner city to engage the neighborhood. For community and economic development work, we push them to have conversations with the community, opening the doors, and talking about ideas and goals they have for their own neighborhood. It's more successful when you engage the community and invite them in. It's sort of difficult to get things done when people look at a development plan as excluding them. When congregations planned or tried to execute a project without including the community, the project falls on its face. If they put them on the board and make them part of the working groups, we find that they're more successful.

Developing Leaders

Regina: Have you found that faith-based community organizations are a good place to develop community leaders?

Ed: In the northern neck of Virginia we're funding a group of about 16 churches. What's interesting is that only one pastor is involved in the leadership; the rest are lay leaders, people who have ordinary jobs in the community. When you drive through those communities, it's like going back to the 1950s - there's a railroad track separating one community, which is into the 21st century, from the other, which is still back there. There's been many years of leadership training and learning issues like getting water and sewers in the ground; they've run candidates for election who have won school board, county commission and city commission races - and all of these are lay people. We funded the Center for Community Change, a couple of consultants and others who taught the group basics - how to have a meeting, how to invite elected officials and how to hold them accountable, that sort of thing. I think that groups can be funded to develop community leaders and I hold that group up as a model.

Michele: There's an interesting twist on this question, based on our more limited experience with faith-based funding. Probably our best example is an organization called the L.A. Metropolitan Churches. They've been together now for five to six years and involve approximately 50 congregations, primarily in South Los Angeles. The congregations are mostly African American, many of them in small storefronts. L.A. Metropolitan Churches reached out to train ministers to become public around a social justice issue - the high rate of prison recidivism. When men came out of prison, they quickly went back in for lack of employment, literacy skills and any number of complex life problems. So these congregations came together and developed a solution - to demand that the city's Probation Department and the District Attorney's office make sure that every prisoner coming out of the system was able to read, write and do basic mathematics at the high school equivalency level. It was a long haul, but after five years it was signed into law. In the process, a number of new leaders developed. I don't know how much the training penetrated to the lay level, but many ministers and pastors were successfully engaged in a public policy issue.

Linetta: The question suggests that faith-based leadership in our communities is welcomed. I think we need to be real clear that some of the faith-based groups that are doing the work aren't necessarily working through their faith. Even in our congregation-based organizing groups, they sometimes get a little nervous when the members start to say, "wait a second, how does this line up with our faith ethic here?" The organizers get nervous because it won't allow them to move as quickly, but the congregants are saying clearly, "we got into this because this organization was going to work through values and beliefs that we have as a congregation." It would be great if we could see more community leaders coming out of these organizations in tandem with their faith.

Ed: There's always tension between leaders who come out of congregations and organizers. They're trying to transcend some of those beliefs that have traditionally caused divisions in communities. I've seen it. I've talked to organizers that we've funded. They're always pushing and sometimes they butt against leaders who say we shouldn't be involved in this. That's a creative tension that will always be there. I do know that out of these efforts lay leaders are identified who go on to become solid community leaders. We fund faith-based organizing. It's sometimes a dangerous thing because the very folk you're funding, once they become organized and knowledgeable, they turn around and bite you.

Jeannie: I have also noticed that leaders in some faith-based institutions have not taken the time to step back and reflect on the theological implications of their work. I haven't had the experience where organizers are actually not encouraging leaders to do that. It could be the different kinds of organizations that we interface with. Sometimes there just doesn't seem to be the time for leaders to devote to addressing the questions of "how is my organization" or "how am I as a leader" living out my faith in this context. Part of the reason is that there's so much to do. There's always the pressing organizing deadlines. I think leaders and organizers alike would love to have more time to reflect on how they are living out their faith through organizing.

Replacing Public Services

Regina: In the public policy arena, there has been a lot of talk about replacing public institutions with faith-based institutions as service providers. Do you think this is realistic?

Ed: No. I don't think faith-based institutions have the resources and the physical facilities to replace some of the publicly-funded institutions. Speaking from a minister's point of view, the danger to me is if faith-based institutions take on the work and the mission of public-funded institutions, there's always the danger of the institutions losing their prophetic voice. And we'll always need prophetic voices in the community to cry against injustice, to hold accountable individuals, government and corporations. I don't think any institution by itself, public or private, can do the job.

Michele: I agree completely around the notion of scale. It's appropriate for some of the faith-based institutions to be a partner, but I can't imagine replacing public responsibility with private institutions and losing that independence and prophetic voice. There isn't the infrastructure, the resources, the training or technical skills.

Linetta: The church used to do this work, but clearly the times have changed. It's just not appropriate for the church to take this on as its primary work. Today the church is trying to address its own mission, and within that context sees a nexus with some of these other challenges. Few faith-based organizations have the infrastructure to maintain the work. Now they can certainly offer competition in some communities where direct service providers haven't been as community oriented, but that's only if the church stays community oriented.

Church/State Separation

Regina: Have your trustees raised issues such as the separation of church and state when it comes to funding faith-based activities?

Linetta: Ours haven't; they've been really wonderful. The chair of our grants committee said recently that it seemed that a great deal of the good work is happening through faith-based organizations. We've had very good results from the groups that we've been working with.

Michele: We haven't had very much difficulty with that in our own foundation, but I remember when we sponsored a program thorough the Regional Association of Grantmakers on "Philanthropy in the Black Church." I was surprised by how many foundations were operating under the myth that they couldn't fund religious institutions. The level of knowledge of our foundation colleagues was quite low about what was allowable and doable. The National Office on Philanthropy and the Black Church has some excellent publications on what types of church organizations can be funded and for what.

Ed: I'm still surprised by the myth that we can't do this. Some more educating needs to be done there.

Influence on Funding

Regina: In some low-income communities, faith institutions are the only viable institutions remaining. Has this influenced your funding?

Linetta: It influences ours tremendously because in inner city and rural communities, it may be the only institution with meeting space, a place where people can find out information, etc. We have also encouraged and worked with faith-based institutions across racial lines to improve the community-building efforts in this region. And we're formally partnering with the African American church in our effort to become a more regional foundation.

Ed: In some rural areas where we work, the stronger institutions are the local churches and often we challenge then to come together across denominational and racial lines. We make grants that encourage them to combine their resources and their other capital. That's why we created the Religion Initiative. We hope that the churches work together, but we'd also like to see some other kinds of nonprofits and institutions created. The danger here is ministers, if they feel their plate is too full, will back away. Their members will remind them why they have been called, and they will say "it's just taking too much of my time." When a nonprofit institution can be created to do that work, it's a good thing.

Michele: Where faith-based institutions have been identified as a vehicle for advancing a public policy change, the potential is huge and promising.

Linetta: Maybe we should think about taking this to another level at NFG. Because of the number of funders working in the area and the new international focus of some of that funding, we need to come together to talk about faith-based efforts and build on the work of the National Office on Philanthropy and the Black Church. With the demographic changes in our country, we need to engage other funders and think about what the challenges and opportunities are.

Regina: On that thought, thank you all for a very stimulating conversation.

Faith-Based Grantmaking Resources

The New York Times recently reported that four years after Congress launched its "Charitable Choice" provision in the welfare law, loosening the rules to make it easier for religious groups to apply for federal financing for social services, the initiative is off to a slower start than many advocates expected. A report by Jim Castelli, John McCarthy, and Mark Chaves for The Aspen Institute's Nonprofit Sector Research Fund identified some of the issues confronting congregations - lack of infrastructure at the national, state or local levels to administer programs and large amounts of funding, and what an expansion would require of faith communities - to wholly change their funding priorities in order to build their capacity. These and other issues confront funders investigating and refining their faith-based grantmaking. Here are a few places where you can get more information about faith-based grantmaking.

• The Aspen Institute's Nonprofit Sector Research Fund's Religion/Faith Based Organizations Project's reports include the above referenced report on faith communities as social service providers, as well as recent research on the characteristics of active churches in faith-based economic development and linkages between religious congregations and nonprofit service organizations. For more information, call 202-736-5800 or go online to www.nonprofitresearch.org.
• The Brookings Institution's Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Congregations, the Government and Social Justice Project is examining five issues, including community development and the role and intersection of faith-based and public sector organizations in addressing those and other issues. For more information, you can call 202-797-6000 or go online to www.brookings.edu/gs/projects/sacredplaces.htm.
• National Congress for Community Economic Development's (NCCED) Faith-Based Community Development Program recently announced a Faith-based Community Economic Development Academy. According to NCCED, in 1998, 14 percent (about 500) of all of the community development corporations in the U.S. identified themselves as "faith-based organizations." For more information, call 202-234-5009 or go online to www.ncced.org.
• National Office on Philanthropy and the Black Church is managed by the Interdenominational Theological Center and the Foundation for the MidSouth. In its work to facilitate strong conversations between the philanthropic sector and religious institutions, it seeks to revitalize neighborhoods and the larger community via economic development. Information on resources and its upcoming program are available from Rev. Ernest Hargrove, Project Director by calling 601-355-8167 or email echargrove@fndmidsouth.org.
• Public/Private Ventures' National Faith-Based Initiative for High-Risk Youth released "Faith-Based Institutions and High Risk Youth" in spring 2000, which provides an initial overview of strategies employed by faith-based institutions in 11 cities. For more information, call 215-557-4400 or go online to www.ppv.org/indexfiles/faith-index.html.
• United Way of Massachusetts Bay's (UWMB) "Evaluating Faith in Action, Report on Faith in Action Evaluation Roundtable, October 1999," develops guidance for UWMB in evaluating its Faith In Action Initiative. The report summarizes a roundtable, which addressed issues such as what should be evaluated and what appropriate evaluation methods might be, and summarized key findings and recommendations. Copies of the report are $7 and are available by calling 617-624-8000 or going online to www.uwmb.org.
• "Faith and Philanthropy, Bridging the Secular and Sacred," by Robert Neuwirth appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of NYRAGTIMES. The dispatches from the frontlines of faith-based philanthropy and accompanying list of Faith and Philanthropy Resources is available online at www.nyrag.org.
  

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