Build your next chapter
Having a clear sense of where you’re heading and what you want to accomplish over time, alongside a clear understanding of your culture and values, can help you make day-to-day decisions in a way that moves you forward authentically toward the organization you’re becoming.
Neighborhood Listening
You might know how you view yourselves, but how does the neighborhood view you? Do you know? What opportunities for partnership are you missing, or opportunities for growth?
Community partners might have feedback that you need to hear and which might directly affect any project you are considering. Including your neighborhood or neighborhood partners from the ground up can be important in future success. By engaging a third party in neighborhood listening, individuals will speak more honestly to a third party than to one who is perceived to have potential power over an organization’s day to day.
Steps
Review and mapping of existing partnerships
Receiving consent for interviews
Organization of community meetings and/or interviews with leaders
Facilitation of church community conversations
Tools
Town hall meetings
Interviews
Surveys
Deliverables
Understanding of community perception
Willingness to engage in otherwise unturned partnerships
Sharing of projects
Collaboration
Strategic Planning
Using the Strategic Filter, and relying on your core values, we’ll work with you to develop a strategic plan. Later in the process you can hone in on the key areas for the plan, which could include:
Identity—how you understand yourself and how are you perceived
Structure—how you are organized and how you operate
Staffing—who is doing the work and how do they work together
Communications—what’s your message, who’s receiving it, when and how
Finance and budgeting—your approach to money and how it relates to your values and priorities
Fundraising and development–how you fund and sustain your community and pursue your vision
Partnerships—who you’re working with or might benefit from working with
Practical Property Analysis
Very often, buildings, especially church buildings, were built for a particular time, place and set of uses that translate to constraints in the current context. Church communities find themselves, more often than not, with a very different set of needs for their community compared to the needs that were in place when their buildings were built. As a result their buildings need to adjust to the times and consider how to serve the surrounding community in new ways.
Leaders often are not trained in building management or shepherding into a new era. We come alongside our clients with expertise to listen to community and church leaders, to buildings and to the land itself. Our work then provides several options for communities to move forward with their buildings based on what is possible.
Steps
Review of existing data and materials
Organization of community meetings and/or interviews with leaders
Facilitation of church community conversations
Tools
Review of zoning, regulatory, and practical constraints
Exploration of market competitions
Interview of town or city leadership
Interviews with community partners
Town hall congregational meetings
Congregational surveys
Results
Top achievable property options
Preliminary financial modeling for options
Anticipated possible predevelopment costs, project schedules and concept plans
Self-understanding of how partners and the neighborhood sees you
Analysis of church leadership readiness for change