Episcopal Press and News
Twelve Projects Receive Foundation Grants
Episcopal News Service. October 27, 1983 [83194]
NEW YORK (DPS, Oct. 27) -- Twelve grants totaling $126,000 were authorized for programs throughout the Church by the executive committee of the board of directors of the Episcopal Church Foundation at a meeting here this month. The projects range in scope from programs for youth and the elderly to an ecumenical plan for building low-cost housing and continuing education for clergy serving small, non-urban parishes.
A grant of $5,000 will help the Diocese of Western North Carolina launch a regional continuing education model program to upgrade the skills of clergy serving rural congregations. The plan has been designed to be carried out by as few as two or as many as eight neighboring dioceses and provides for a series of five-day seminars on small church ministry.
The Alban Institute of Washington, DC, received $8,000 for an 18-month research project to develop more effective ministries to clergy families to help prevent clergy divorce and to discover more helpful aftercare for parishes and clergy families when divorce is not preventable. Twelve judicatories from different denominations will be invited to participate.
East Brooklyn Churches is an ecumenical undertaking of 42 churches, including four Episcopal parishes, to build 5,000 single-family, low-cost row houses in Brooklyn, N.Y. This program received a second Foundation grant of $50,000 to help fund its administrative expenses.
With help from a $5,000 grant, the Diocese of Montana will build a more lively network of youth activities, such as a summer camp, a diocesan youth convention and deanery workshops, through the efforts of a parish circuit rider who will visit each parish and mission in the diocese to stimulate the interest of young people and adult advisors.
A study of 20 promising situations in small-congregation ministry will be carried out, with the aid of a $10,000 grant, by the General Convention's Standing Commission on the Church in Small Communities. This will be the basis for a paper clarifying how clergy leadership is best provided and maintained in small churches.
A grant of $7,000 will furnish honoraria for speakers at a five-day meeting of Episcopal college students and chaplains at Estes Park, Colo., over New Years, 1984. The meeting will offer an opportunity to engage the best younger minds of the Church in an intensive time of reflection and study.
The Episcopal Service Alliance of Santa Ana, Calif. coordinates the outreach efforts of 18 Episcopal parishes and 32 churches through four food distribution centers in Orange County. A $5,000 grant will help to staff a central administrative office for this project.
In Pascagoula, Miss., an interfaith coalition of 29 churches called United Christian Outreach provides food and other services to the aging to enable them to live in their own homes. A $10,000 grant, made on a two-for-one matching basis, will help the administration coordinate the efforts of several hundred volunteers.
The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is launching a program to provide on-the-job training to urban high school graduates with help from a $10,000 Foundation grant. Working closely with local business leaders, the Cathedral will offer training in the areas of custodial, security and building maintenance, in each of which fields there are local job openings.
A $1,000 grant to Interim Network of Washington, D.C., the second to this organization, will help this interdenominational project to assist interim rectors and provide consultants' services to local congregations between rectors, through a newsletter and an annual conference.
With the aid of a $7,500 grant, the Church Society for College Work is initiating a three-pronged program of ministry to and with the nation's intellectual community, particularly with college faculty and administrators. Plans call for publishing a quarterly journal, staging an annual conference and a month-long summer research colloquium of individuals projects on the relation of religion to academic/intellectual life.
Three west-side New York City Episcopal parishes are sponsoring the Jericho Project, with aid from a $7,5000 Foundation grant, $2,500 of it on a matching basis. Homeless men and women will be housed in a brownstone residence and a single occupancy hotel while they work with parishioners on congregational outreach and enroll in vocational training courses for future employment.
In addition to grants, the Episcopal Church Foundation makes loans for parish and mission building programs and awards fellowships to recent seminary graduates for doctoral study. The Foundation is a national, independent organization of lay men and women who support significant projects not included in regular church budgets.
