Center for Rural Strategies Receives $1.5M Grant to Document Rural Faith Communities
A church near Mountain City, Tennessee. Photo by Shawn Poynter.
WHITESBURG, KENTUCKY – Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded the Kentucky-based Center for Rural Strategies a $1.5 million grant support Rural Strategies as it documents the novel and long-established ways rural congregations serve their communities. Lilly Endowment made the grant through its Ministry in Rural Areas and Small Towns Initiative, a national effort to help churches in rural areas and small towns enhance the vitality of their ministries and strengthen the leadership of the pastors and lay leaders who guide them.
“More and more faith communities are on the front lines of dealing with challenges confronting the future of small towns: hunger, addiction, exclusion, and poverty. They are also central to finding a common path forward,” said Dee Davis, President of the Center for Rural Strategies. “At the Center for Rural Strategies we are excited to document the work going on in rural congregations and to shine a light on what’s working.”
Through audio storytelling, documentary work and written stories, Rural Strategies will show how rural faith communities can bring people together, serve as anchors in small towns and the countryside, and help drive solutions for rural America’s biggest challenges. The project also aims to convene faith leaders and their congregations — to listen, to learn, and to support relationships within and across communities.
“There are hard realities in rural communities, to be sure, and a host of emotions that come with them—grief, anger, worry, uncertainty. But there is also a dogged hopefulness, rooted in faith, in stories, and in trusting one another to keep showing up and making a way out of no way,” said Whitney Kimball Coe, the Center for Rural Strategies’ Project Director and Vice President of National Programs. “We’re grateful for the opportunity to support and learn from folks whose faith calls them to hope and action in their communities.”
The Center for Rural Strategies is one of 20 organizations from across the United States receiving grants through the initiative, including colleges and universities, denominational agencies, church networks, and parachurch organizations, among others.
“Our hope is that these grants will provide much needed resources and support to rural and small-town churches to help them address their challenges and enhance and extend the many ways that they serve their communities,” said Christopher L. Coble, Lilly Endowment’s vice president for religion.
About Lilly Endowment Inc
Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly, Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. Although the gifts of stock remain a financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion and maintains a special commitment to its founders’ hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana.
A primary aim of its grantmaking in religion is to deepen the religious lives of Christians, principally by supporting efforts that enhance congregational vitality and strengthen the leadership of Christian communities. The Endowment values the broad diversity of Christian traditions and endeavors to support them in a wide variety of contexts. The Endowment also seeks to foster public understanding about religion by encouraging fair, accurate and balanced portrayals of the positive and negative effects of religion on the world and lifting up the contributions that people of all faiths make to our greater civic well-being.
About the Center for Rural Strategies
The Center for Rural Strategies seeks to improve economic and social conditions for communities in the countryside and around the world through the creative and innovative use of media and communications. Rural Strategies strives to create better opportunities for small towns and rural communities by building coalitions, developing partnerships, leading public information campaigns, and advancing strategies that strengthen connections between rural and urban places. Rural Strategies’s newsroom, the Daily Yonder, and the Rural Assembly aid its work in uplifting rural communities and telling their stories.