“So…do you know where we could apply for a grant to get our parking lot repaved?”   

Over the years in our Cultivating Generous Congregations team-based courses and in the Executive Certificate in Religious Fundraising course, we’ve pretty regularly been asked for advice like this, and we have to gently steer those well-intentioned leaders toward other ways of finding the resources they need. There aren’t any foundations that we know of whose focus is congregational parking lot repair!   

But we also realized, in conversation with foundation leaders as well as congregational and religious nonprofit leaders, that too often each of those two groups is missing out on the really excellent work that the other is doing. Both organized philanthropy and organized religion are addressing real community needs in meaningful ways all around the country, but too often the leaders on each side don’t know the other sector well enough—and perhaps don’t even know how to get started with getting to know each other—and vital partnership opportunities are being missed. Foundations need religious organizations’ expertise and access to address critical community issues effectively—and religious organizations need the resources as well as the connections and perspective that funders can often offer.   

With all this in mind, we pulled on our own team’s experiences on both the grant writing and grant making sides of the work, the research and best practices from the wider resources of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and the decades of wisdom gleaned from Lake’s work with faith congregations and faith-based nonprofits to build a new live-cohort online course.   

Lake deeply values the ways that cohort-based learning draws out participants’ own contextual expertise and supports a lively learning environment built around human connection and the opportunity for new ideas and encouragement to come to life over the several weeks that the group gathers for online plenary sessions, in addition to the resources provided for self-study and resources to take back to one’s team in the course site platform.   

We were so grateful for the warm and wise engagement from the pilot cohort this fall, and we’re eager to refine the course and offer a second iteration in the spring!  We still probably can’t help anyone with parking lot repaving grants—but there are huge opportunities to explore and partnerships to be made to address the concerns that both foundations and religious institutions care about in their communities.