Faith In/And Democracy: What’s Different This Year?
This week, PACE announced an expansion of its Faith In/And Democracy (FIAD) initiative as it enters its third year and reaches $1 million in grants. Launched in 2019, FIAD is a funding and learning initiative dedicated to exploring the ways faith and faith communities support democracy and civic life.
While this third year builds on the learnings and grantmaking of the first two years, we wondered if we could dig deeper into what those learnings were and how they shaped the initiative moving forward. We asked Amy McIsaac, PACE’s Director of Learning and Experimentation, a few questions as a leader of the initiative and of PACE’s learning overall.
PACE: Can you explain what is different about the Faith In/And Democracy initiative this year? What separates this year from the other years of the initiative?
Amy McIsaac: FIAD started as a one-year pilot in 2019. The first year, we sought to see if there was a field working at the intersection of faith and democracy and confirmed our hypothesis about the positive impact of faith leaders and organizations to bridge difference and inspire civic engagement. This led us to extend the pilot into a three-year pooled funding and learning initiative. In the second year, we deepened our understanding of the field and specifically sought to learn about the traits and conditions of faith leaders and institutions that make them effective bridge-builders. A major learning theme across both years was that philanthropic investment in the faith/democracy field is small compared to the need, opportunities, and potential benefits. A recent Bridgespan report further underscored this as well.
With this in mind, a couple things are different in this third year. First, we welcomed two new funders — the Henry Luce Foundation and the McKnight Foundation — to the initiative this year. They join the Fetzer Institute, the Democracy Fund, Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, and the Ford Foundation in pooling resources to support this fund. These combined contributions will enable the three-year pooled fund to distribute over $1 million in grants by August 2022.
Second, the grantmaking out of this fund is shifting away from our previous project-based approach — in which we ran a competitive grant process to select 5–6 projects to receive funding — and moving towards a two-pronged approach: 1) expanding and diversifying the FIAD Learning Community and compensating participants for their time and expertise, and 2) operating a participatory fund to generate new evidence of faith’s influence on democracy and civic life, as guided by the Learning Community. In other words, the Learning Community is becoming the focus of the initiative this year. The Learning Community has always been core to FIAD’s work, serving as a “laboratory” to test key questions about the influence of faith communities on democracy and civic life. But now it will be positioned as the major environment of our learning, which motivated us to both expand the number of faith and democracy leaders in the community and diversify the perspectives within it. In this third year, our Learning Community will go from 20 to 34 members, which includes the funders of the initiative as well as leaders in the faith and democracy space. We sourced those leaders from projects we previously funded, people who have been advising the initiative from the start, and nominations from the Learning Community. Each non-funder participant is compensated for their time and contributions with a participation grant. A full list of the Learning Community can be found here.
Lastly, the world is really different now than when FIAD launched in 2019, and when we thought about where this Learning Community might focus its learning, we felt compelled to shape a learning question that spoke into the moment: What is the influence of faith communities on democracy and civic life? That might sound basic, but what we’re really trying to understand is how faith leaders and organizations inspire civic leadership, build civic character, preserve and sustain civil rights, and support/bridge their communities — especially through social and political flashpoints.
PACE: It seems like FIAD is taking a new approach this year. What insights led the initiative to move in this direction?
AM: Over the last two years, we have been learning about the intersection of faith and democracy and the ways faith influences our civic life. But we have also been learning a lot about learning and how to operate a pooled fund with learning goals. I would say three insights impacted the direction we took this year.
First, at PACE, we have been really sitting with this insight: there is a major difference between learning for broad exploration and learning for a specific purpose. While both are important to an overall learning journey, we wondered if we could better serve our goal of producing and contributing learning that is meaningful and actionable by trading a little learning exploration in service of finding greater learning purpose. This is a major reason why you see a sharper framing question in year 3.
Relatedly, we think the initiative is ready to move into a space of finding and documenting evidence around faith’s influence on democracy and civic life. That is why you see the FIAD Fund as part of the design this year. It aims to support projects that build the evidence case around faith’s role in democracy. It’s sort of like the “show” part of “show and tell.” And we are purposefully making the FIAD Fund a participatory fund, as we believe the people who know what evidence is possible and needed are the faith leaders and funders who are engaging in the Learning Community.
Lastly, the decision to shift the grantmaking of this fund away from supporting projects and toward supporting the Learning Community came from an insight that our best learning was happening in the Learning Community setting; that was where our biggest insights and deepest understanding was growing. So we knew we wanted to position the Learning Community as the center of the initiative moving forward, but that led us to struggle with what grantmaking looked like in this new context. Then we had a major insight: PACE is not a funder, nor was it ever meant to be. It is a learning organization, but funds are necessary to compensate people for their time and contributions so that the learning is not extractive. That is why you see the evolution of our grantmaking away from project-based support and towards participation grants for Learning Community members and the FIAD Fund as a participatory fund.
PACE: What does success look like in this third year of the initiative?
AM: Our hope at the end of this third year is that we have a body of knowledge and evidence that supports the assertion that faith is playing an important role in shaping and strengthening our democracy and civic life. Especially in light of the pandemic, the racial uprisings, the election, and other pivotal moments that have emerged over the last year, we are particularly interested in understanding the influence and impact of faith in these social and political “flashpoints.” We think there is a story there that needs to be amplified. In addition, we hope to continue to build a community of people invested in and working at the intersection of faith and democracy. That has always been a goal of this work, and we hope to strengthen that this year. Lastly, FIAD is a three-year initiative for PACE, so as we enter this third year, success to us will include a plan for how this work manifests long-term.
PACE: What learning do you think the initiative has done thus far? What about faith’s role in shaping democracy do you think needs to be amplified?
AM: Two years in, we have learned so much. Members of the Learning Community have written a tremendous amount about the insights and learnings that have surfaced during this initiative. Some of the biggest ones that come to mind include Nothing Does What Faith Does the Way Faith Does It, a sentiment from our colleague Michael Wear that puts to words what we are learning makes faith unique as force within democracy; Scaling Faith-Based Civic Engagement, a detailed look from our colleague Chris Crawford that provides a funder’s perspective on this work and shares learnings about the divisions within faith traditions, the emotional toll of bridge-building work, and the way physical spaces and physical networks can change the way in which this work is carried out; and What, Why, How: Our Learnings about Theories of Change in Bridge-building Work, a learning offered by our colleague Diane Douglas breaking down the three approaches to bridging we have observed faith-inspired groups often take: bridging to understand, bridging to persuade, and bridging to co-create.
To learn more about the Faith In/And Democracy initiative, please visit the website and check out the announcement of its third year.
As PACE’s first Director of Learning and Experimentation, Amy is responsible for developing and executing PACE’s organizational learning agenda and the programmatic elements to achieve it. She works closely with PACE members to identify learning themes and objectives aligned with their interests and priorities. Amy is a member of PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Learning Community.
