Remembering her guidance in recognizing and supporting it.
Barbara J. Elliott, who died last month, was an active civic leader, prolific author, and staunch advocate for civil society and philanthropy—which she thought much better practiced when it looked to support those groups too often overlooked, including local, faith-based ones. Her combination of graciousness and kind-heartedness blessed all those with whom she worked, and helped.
In remembrance of her, with permission from its publisher Templeton Press, we republish an edited version of William A. Schambra’s introduction to her 2005 book Equipping the Saints: A Guide for Giving to Faith-Based Organizations.
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The most inspiring and rewarding part of my job as a program officer for 10 years at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation was the all-too-infrequent site visit to one of our faith-based grantees in Milwaukee’s inner city. Otherwise confined to a comfortable office, plowing through grant proposals or puzzling over project budgets, it was all too easy to forget why I was there, and who was really helped by my work. But such questions were quickly laid to rest with a visit to the late Bill Lock’s Community Enterprises of Greater Milwaukee, or Cordelia Taylor’s Family House, or Ramon Candeleria’s Latino Community Center.
Here, I witnessed saints at work. Their lives had been touched and transformed by faith, and now they were kindling the same transformation in the lives of others. Whether they were preparing former welfare recipients for gainful employment, or easing the final hours of an elderly homeless person, or pulling young people out of gangs, they pursued their work with the quiet but unshakable confidence that they were answering thereby a summons from God. The message to their hard-pressed communities: just as we have been carried by faith through the most trying times and most demanding challenges, so shall your burdens be made lighter by faith. No one—certainly not this otherwise complacent program officer—could witness the work of such profound faith under such trying circumstances without going away reinspirited and renewed. Thus was I reminded of the work I was about as a program officer: helping my foundation to equip the saints.
Given the Bradley Foundation’s willing support of faith-based groups—it has made grants ranging from a few thousand dollars for a new roof at a store-front ministry to a $1 million grant to Pastor Sedgwick Daniel’s Holy Redeemer Church of God in Christ for a community center—it has always been somewhat puzzling to me that other foundations and donors seemed so hesitant about supporting such groups. It is particularly perplexing at a time when, as Barbara Elliott notes herein, social science research has begun to document the effectiveness of faith-based organizations at solving social problems, and when major public figures of all political stripes, including the president of the United States, have argued that even government should be prepared to assist faith-based institutions, within the limits prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. But there are plausible reasons for this hesitancy.
Peering out from foundation or corporate offices toward low-income inner city or rural communities, it is often very difficult to see beyond a handful of large, nationally known nonprofits, lavishly equipped with aggressive publicity and fundraising arms. These organizations are typically secular, or religious only in a rather nominal way. The faith-based groups discussed in this volume, by contrast, are almost invisible from privileged enclaves downtown or in the suburbs. They are located in old storefronts in the toughest neighborhoods, with mismatched furniture, water-stained ceilings, and duct tape on the carpet. They are often manned by unpaid volunteers, whose chief credential for service is that they themselves have, by the grace of God, transcended the circumstances out of which they are now trying to lift others. It’s usually more efficient for them to scrape by on small donations from their friends or from their own pockets than to try to master the demanding art of fundraising and report-writing. And yet these are the groups that are, person by person and block by block, reclaiming individuals and neighborhoods otherwise forgotten by the major institutions of government and philanthropy.
How do we equip these saints? How do we bridge the chasm between donor and grassroots, faith-based group? We need a guide—someone who is comfortable in both worlds, and who can mark the paths back and forth between them. Thankfully, we have such a guide in Barbara Elliott. Ms. Elliott is a compelling speaker and widely published author of books and articles on the role of faith in civic renewal. She has worked for major national think tanks and publications and in the White House, and has received awards at the hand of the president of the United States. She is at home in the most powerful and wealthy circles in the nation.
And yet, as this volume will demonstrate, she is not content to remain in that world. Her primary passion is to seek out and bring to our attention precisely those smaller, faith-based grassroots efforts that are otherwise so easily overlooked. She moves with ease in that world, as well, because she, too, values the deep spiritual nourishment and enrichment that she finds there.
This volume, then, is a guide for donors who, perhaps intrigued by all the talk about faith-based initiatives, may have pondered helping them, but were uncertain of the best path into that world. Ms. Elliott and her colleagues at The Legacy Group, Inc. provide the sorts of observations, suggestions, precautions, and checklists that any donor would need to make prudent, effective grants to smaller organizations. But they are offered without the patronizing air of superiority that typically accompanies such devices. That is because they understand that the leaders of successful grassroots groups, and national spokesmen for them like Robert Woodson at the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, are the primary authorities on the sources of and solutions to America’s social ills.
Consequently, this volume will show the donor where it is useful to turn off the well-paved highway leading to the coffers of the massive, bureaucratic, impersonal, and therefore often less effective social service agencies. This is no mean accomplishment, in a philanthropic world where the customary approach is for initiatives to be cooked up by academically credentialed experts back at foundation headquarters, which will then be enthusiastically embraced by the “usual suspects”—the large nonprofits with well-paid professional grantwriters, who can only profess astonishment at the degree of congruence between their nonprofit’s fervent wish and the foundation’s serene command.
Following the paths marked out by Ms. Elliott in this volume, prospective donors will soon find that they, too, are able to move freely between the worlds of philanthropy and faith-based, grassroots initiatives. They will then come upon their own Bill Locks, Cordelia Taylors, and Ramon Candelerias, who will serve as local guides through the rich, diverse landscapes of the neighborhoods they love and serve. These local guides will be able offer new sources of wisdom and guidance, rooted in local knowledge, practical experience, and a keen understanding of which local leaders are religious charlatans, and which are individuals of genuine spiritual integrity. I know that Ms. Elliott would agree that this is the sort of donors’ understanding that can never be captured in one guidebook. But her guidebook is the indispensable first step toward the acquisition of that larger, more subtle, more intuitive, and finally more profound understanding.
Donors following Ms. Elliott’s guidance into that world will soon find that they, too, have discovered previously unimagined sources of spiritual nourishment and refreshment, in the least likely of places. Especially in moments of doubt about the value of their work and gifts, they too will find reasons to make site visits to favorite grantees, allegedly to check up on the stewardship of resources, but in fact simply to listen to words of calm assurance about the work of the Spirit in the world, to witness first hand previously forsaken souls now walking the earth free of addictions, poverty, and despair, and to be in the presence of people who unmistakably bear the marks of the hand of God.
We begin this journey with a desire to equip the saints. But the journey leads us to a place where the saints equip us.
