Mapping Your Community's Faith-Based Assets

Abstract

Mapping Your Community's Faith-Based Assets was developed for public managers interested in strategically engaging their city's faith-based organizations. It serves as an easy-to-apply inventory tool that helps in identifying the potential areas for cross-sector collaboration with faith-based organizations. Too often, researchers and local governments overlook local faith-based organizations, particularly smaller ones, despite their important contributions to local communities. This tool should thus prove instructive to most local officials. This tool's six-step methodology will provide public managers with (1) a comprehensive listing of the local faith-based organizations in a geographically defined area, and (2) an opportunity inventory tool that lays out, in an easy-to-understand format, the faith-based assets in their communities. This tool is part of City Hall and Religion: An Online Curriculum for Public Managers. With support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the City Hall and Religion curriculum was designed as a professional resource for mayors, and other public managers, interested in urban revitalization through cross-sector collaboration.