THE REPORT
Effective fundraising is essential for ministries to have the needed resources to fulfill their purpose.
In 2015 Project Resource was created as a collaborative initiative between the College of Bishops, Development Office of the Episcopal Church, and the Episcopal Church Foundation to train diocesan teams from across the Episcopal Church on effective fundraising strategies rooted in a deep theology of giving. It was at the inaugural event in September 2015 that Project Resource faculty, Erin Weber-Johnson, was providing national data on generational characteristics and teaching how to apply this data to implement corresponding fundraising strategies.
At the end of the segment, Bishop Eugene Sutton noted that while the national data seemed to reflect those in his diocese in predominantly white parishes, it did not reflect what he knew of parishes with majority people of color. He asked if there was such data available for the creation of additional strategies. At that time Erin both consulted and trained others on fundraising for years but was not aware of the need for the data till that very moment. She promised Bishop Sutton to provide him this data.
After a year of asking every denominational body and every major religious research entity, several key learnings emerged:
This data does not exist in either qualitative and quantitative form.
There are very few number of professional fundraisers of color located across denominations.
Research bodies that previously tried to gather data from communities of color have done so by using
large scale studies and oversampling--with consistently unverifiable results.
Research attempted in the past has not been initiated for the purpose of providing communities of color strategies for effective fundraising based on their data.
It became increasingly clear that if a team wasn’t would not be addressed. Without this vital information, leaders, like Erin at Project Resource, will continue to teach and utilize strategies developed based on incomplete data at all levels of our institutions.
At this point, out of Vandersall Collective, the nonprofit organization named Collective Foundation was formed to address this lack and work to provide the research for Christian communities of color. The Board held five gatherings with close to 100 participants throughout the United States and then with the support of research analyst Dr. Amy Thayer, made sense of the emerging themes. We published a report, which you can find here, and we hope can be helpful within your own context.
In 2022, after completing our research and report, the Collective Foundation retired its board and name. Due to the conceptual relationship with Vandersall Collective, the report continues to live on this website.
