Faith In/And Democracy Initiative Supports New Projects at the Intersection of Faith + Democracy
Launched in 2019, Faith In/And Democracy is a funding and learning initiative dedicated to exploring the ways faith and faith communities support democracy and civic life. Last year, PACE announced an expansion of its FIAD initiative as it entered its third year and reached $1 million in grants. We were excited to share how the third year would be an evolution of the initiative’s first two years. Now we are pleased to share that these elements are coming to life.
This year, we took experimentation a step further for the initiative and established the FIAD Fund–a dedicated portion of the pooled fund ($175,000) to support projects that build the evidence case around faith’s role in democracy. FIAD Learning Community members were eligible to submit proposals to the fund, and we received 13 proposals totaling over $461,000. We utilized participatory grantmaking practices to review and recommend projects; through that process, a jury of non-submitting learning community members read, scored, and deliberated the proposals, which resulted in the selection of six projects to support. All of the projects supported through this fund are testing their own hypotheses about how to advance, strengthen, and innovate on faith’s role in democracy. PACE anticipates their learning will help produce evidence that can be instructive and actionable for other leaders.
Below, we introduce you to the six projects, and we look forward to keeping you updated on their progress over the year!
(Projects are presented in alphabetical order.)
American Muslim Advisory Council
The Muslim population in Tennessee is estimated to be around 70,000. AMAC is the only group in Tennessee that is capturing data on the Muslim community. Other civic groups rely on AMAC to coordinate and mobilize Muslims across the state to be civically engaged. Although, anecdotally, AMAC has seen the link between civic activities at mosques and civic engagement in the Muslim community, it has never had the capacity and resources to capture the data to prove this. Through this funding, AMAC will investigate how civic engagement initiatives like advocacy training and candidate forums that are endorsed by religious leaders and hosted and promoted by mosques influence Muslims’ engagement with elected officials and voting in an election.
Aspen Institute Religion and Society Program and Indiana University
In 2021, IAP and Indiana University conducted a study that identified the field of public foundations in the U.S., differentiated between faith-based and secular public foundations, and compared their characteristics by analyzing Form 990 data. They will now expand this work and create new evidence by conducting a similar study among private foundations in the U.S. While they found that 17% of public foundations are faith-based, the researchers hypothesize that an even greater percentage of private foundations are faith-based. Combining the completed study of public foundations with this new study of private foundations will provide a comprehensive dataset covering the entire field of foundations in the U.S. This dataset will significantly increase understanding of the scope and scale of faith-based foundations in the U.S. and allow researchers and practitioners to track the sources and flow of faith-based funding to faith communities and other entities throughout the nonprofit sector.
Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition and Native Movement
Spiritual dimensions of faith, including Indigenous and non-Indigenous spirituality, motivate care for the Earth and for one another and provide a fundamental foundation for civic actions that address social inequities associated with challenges such as climate change, food insecurity, and cultural integrity. Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition and Native Movement seek to understand the spiritual dimensions of faith in different faith traditions and the ways in which these are called upon to motivate people to plan and take actions to reduce social inequities, especially those associated with climate change and food insecurity or which undermine cultural traditions. They will test this by interviewing leaders of diverse faith traditions, specifically about their spiritual foundation and about the actions and outcomes of projects that resulted from this spiritual motivation. The goal is to understand the links between spiritual foundations, actions, and outcomes.
Faith Matters Network
Faith Matters Network has successfully led learning journeys for faith leaders on skills for social healing and civic engagement in politically polarized places. Building on their best practices, they plan to spend the next two years designing and leading a new congregational learning journey focused on democracy as a spiritual practice. Congregations and their leadership will focus on civic engagement, undermining white supremacy, and healing from racial trauma in communities that are on the front lines of the compounding challenges of political polarization, climate change, economic disinvestment, and disinformation that threatens the fabric of our civic life. FIAD Fund support will contribute to this larger project by providing the resources to evaluate past work, develop evaluative practices for the next program, and share out best practices with field leaders. FIAD Fund support will help create evaluation tools that can be used throughout the project and to analyze data from Disciples of Welcome (North Carolina) and Micah Fellows (Arkansas) to create a list of best practices for faith-based democratic engagement in politically polarized communities.
Live Free Illinois
Live Free Illinois will use both quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the growth of social justice ministries, their engagement with the community, and their ability to win change in their community. LFI’s evidence will include narrative and data through a combination of stories, measurable data, and community impact. They will ask congregations to keep track of 1–1’s, relationships developed with community partners, meetings with elected officials, work to advance policy and activate voters, number of justice-impacted people, number of people impacted by gun violence, and number of people impacted by police violence. They will also track the number of trainings attended and the growth of the justice ministries.
Neighborly Faith
This project will gather publishable evidence on how faith leadership impacts evangelical (“born again”) Gen Z’s civic engagement. Neighborly Faith will conduct a nationally representative study that measures this impact and use this data to support and promote its approach to catalyzing civic engagement by empowering faith leaders and their institutions. The study will quantify the extent to which evangelical Gen Z’s (specifically: 18–25s) civic activities and beliefs are shaped by their faith leaders, and how these compare to other leaders in their lives. The study will survey 1000–2000 evangelical Gen Zs across the nation and result in enough detailed data to answer important questions about faith leaders’ unique capacity for impact.
For more information about PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy initiative, please visit www.PACEFunders.org/faith.
