Big News: New grant will expand Neighboring Movement's reach

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We always have our eyes peeled for grant requests for proposals (RFPs) that are looking for work that seems to align with our vision of cultivating the capacity of neighbors to produce their own future. At the beginning of 2020, we learned about an RFP from the Lilly Endowment called the Thriving Congregations Initiative that seemed to have been written directly for us. It was clear right away we wanted to apply, but we knew we couldn’t go at it alone. We would need partnership and oversight to handle such a large grant and we knew exactly who to ask! The United Methodist Health Ministry Fund, or Health Fund for short.

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The Health Fund has been a partner of ours for several years and has helped fund several cohorts of the Good Neighbor Experiment (GNE), our learning experience for local churches. So all spring we met with the Health Fund to map out a way to expand the GNE by creating a network of facilitators who could reach more churches. We added a research component in partnership with Wichita State University School of Social Work that would help pair quantitative data with the qualitative stories we have been gathering for years. By the June deadline for the grant, we were pretty happy with our work, but still well aware of the competition we were up against.

You see, the Lilly Endowment is the big leagues. They don’t give out small grants and we weren’t asking for a small grant. We asked for just under $1 million dollars over 5 years….it still is astonishing to write that statement. We asked for the big bucks because we believe in this mission, we believe churches are uniquely ready to strengthen the social fabric of their communities through neighboring.

Three months later the letter arrived and the Health Fund sent us the message. From around 800 applications Lilly had selected 92 recipients and we were among them. The full announcement and list of winners is on their website. You can hear our first reactions to receiving the news on our podcast The Neighbor Next Door in the episode released on 11/17.

It’s been several weeks since we heard the news and we still can’t believe our luck! We will have more announcements soon regarding changes in staffing and systems we are putting in place to launch the work as we head into 2021. Here are a few of the highlights about what the grant will allow us to do.

  • We have made Rev. Karen Rice Ratzlaff a full-time employee as the Good Neighbor Experiment Coordinator.

  • Over the next 5 years we will recruit 30 facilitators who will be trained to recruit and support churches in their regional area who want to participate in the Good Neighbor Experiment.

  • We will research the impact on community health when neighbor to neighbor relationships are increased.

  • We will provide churches who participate in the Good Neighbor Experiment access to resources created by the Health Fund’s program called Healthy Congregations.

  • We continue updating the small group curriculum that is the heart of the Good Neighbor Experiment and helps church folks neighbor where they live and neighbor as a faith community.

Click here see the full press release from the Health Fund about our grant awarded.

Here is a video from our partner in this work David Jordan, President and CEO of the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund.