Five Projects Receive Foundation Grants
Episcopal News Service. May 19, 1977 [77169]
New York, N.Y. -- Programs to benefit small congregations and seminarians from Latin America, to improve the prospects for employment of women in the Church, to complete a study of the office of bishop and to combat alcoholism among Indians and Eskimos in Alaska have received grants from The Episcopal Church Foundation. The grants total $27,700, with promise of an additional $2,500 each to two projects on a matching fund basis.
There are 4,000 congregations in the Episcopal Church today with membership of 200 or less, and similarly small parishes exist in other Churches of the Anglican Communion. With the aid of a $5,000 grant from the Foundation, the Resource Center for Small Churches in Luling, Tex., plans to identify specific needs of such congregations and to collect existing data from Anglican and other Churches. The information will then be published and distributed throughout this country and abroad. A matching grant of $2,500 has been promised if the Center raises $5,000 from other sources.
To provide scholarships for seminarians, priests or lay workers from Latin America, a grant of $7,500 was made to The Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Tex., which has been training students from this area for the past several years. The seminary welcomes the creation of a Spanish-language community on campus for the sake of the Church's domestic mission among people of Latin American extraction, as well as offering its resources to the Church in Latin America.
The Mid-Atlantic Career Center in Washington, D. C., received a grant of $7,500 to conduct job-finding seminars for women trained for the ordained ministry and other church professions, to help them identify their special skills for ministry and find positions within the Church. Other meetings will be held at which diocesan leaders will be invited to assess barriers to women's employment and to suggest means of overcoming them. The project is not designed to act as a placement service, but to plan strategy and coach its women participants.
Two years ago the Foundation made a grant to the Committee on Pastoral Development of the House of Bishops, to conduct a research study of the office of bishop. The study sought to identify the bishop's role today and determine how it will change in the next few decades so that each diocese might examine its relationship with its bishop, especially when electing a new one, and the bishop might plan his goals more realistically. A second grant of $2,700 will enable this project to be completed.
Alcoholism and drug abuse have reached epidemic proportions in Alaska, where the impact of oil development on an already fragile native culture has further exacerbated this trend. Indians and Eskimos comprise one-third of the Church's membership in Alaska, and the diocese has initiated a program to provide information and education on alcohol abuse to indigenous leadership in 18 Eskimo and Indian villages. With the help of a $5,000 Foundation grant and the promise of a further matching grant of $2,500, a core of responsible native persons ordained to the priesthood will form the nucleus of a growing network of community leaders trained and equipped to deal with alcoholism and drug abuse.
The Episcopal Church Foundation is a national, independent organization of lay men and women who work together to support the Church through a program of grants such as these, loans and fellowships.