Strategies for Faith Based Organizations

The Faith and Organizations Project was designed to provide practical advice to faith communities and faith based organizations (FBOs) based on research to understand the relationship between faith based organizations and their founding communities; the role of their faith tradition in organization programing and operations; the role of FBOs in the sectors of education, social services, community development, and health and senior services (including their relationship with government and other funders), and the interaction between FBOs and the people they serve, many who come from different faiths and socio-economic backgrounds.  The project compared organizations founded by Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Evangelicals, Muslims, Peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites), and African American Christians. The project produced a series of reports, strategy documents, practitioner articles, and a policy statement in addition to webinars, workshops, tailored fact sheets, and academic articles/journal special issues.  Each document was developed by a team of researchers with ongoing guidance from practitioners who were leaders in their religion and field. All documents were made available free of charge for download on the project website.  Realizing that many small organizations and faith communities do not have expensive, up to date printers and computers needed to load and print most reports today, the project created two versions of each document – one with pictures and graphics, another that was printer friendly for older technology.