Place Matters

We are thrilled to give you an inside look at our local businesses by introducing you to the amazing people who run them each day welcoming customers and ensuring we remain deeply connected to the neighborhood. This week we are focusing on Community Grounds, our neighborhood coffee shop, and cafe FCS opened to create a local third space - a safe, welcoming environment for neighbors to connect, belong, curate neighborhood identity, and care for each other.

Listen in on two of our leaders at Community Grounds: Carlissa Woodruff who is the Kitchen Lead and Brittley Pearson our Barista Lead. Not only are they employees and leaders, but they are also residents of Historic South Atlanta.

We are especially excited to give you an inside look at our local businesses by introducing you to the amazing people who run them each day welcoming customers and ensuring we remain deeply connected to the neighborhood. Hear an inside look inside Carver Market, the neighborhood grocery store FCS opened in 2016 to end a food desert and catalyze an oasis of connection. 

This is an eye-opening conversation with two of our leaders at Carver Market, Michelle Thomas who is the Shift Lead, and Sherry Pyburn our Grocery Lead. Not only are they employees and leaders, but they are also residents of Historic South Atlanta.

A disproportionate percentage of food deserts are majority Black and brown neighborhoods. One of the things we have found is that, ironically, large, chain grocery stores with their expansive parking lots do more to perpetuate food deserts than to solve them. So what do we do? How can we create right-size grocery stores in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty where they are most needed? 

We are excited to share with you a conversation with one of the key partners that has made Carver Market possible, Jimmy Wright. Jimmy runs a local grocery store in Opelika, AL called Wrights Market which is doing the same kind of innovative and restorative work in his neighborhood.

How do we bring about economic vitality in places designed to not experience it? Well, to be honest, most of the time we have to find hacks to make a way out of no way. Whether it is breaking up a food desert, launching a cafe, or setting up a hub for entrepreneurs and small business owners, we are often creating innovative hacks that work against what is, for the sake of what it should be.

FCS has a mantra on the walls of our office - “We can do hard things.” This is there because just about everything we do is profoundly difficult. And it is challenging because the systems and structure were built to create the conditions we are trying to reverse. In our previous episode, we made the case of doing economic development at the scale of the neighborhood - being of, with, and for the neighborhood. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how it does work, we felt it honest and important to start with how it *doesn’t work. There are sizeable barriers that you will face if you choose to join us on the path of holistic neighborhood development.

FCS has chosen to work in historically Black and brown neighborhoods that are experiencing the concentrated forces of inequity. All too often, deliberately disadvantaged neighborhoods, get blamed for the conditions that are out of their control. And, at the same time, the solutions being devised don’t include them either. This is painfully obvious when we look at the way our cities think about economic development. Most of the systems and strategies we are using are creating problems, not solving them. FCS advocates that ending inequity and promoting prosperity means getting our economic scales adjusted to the unit of the neighborhood. What might it mean to change the paradigm and begin the pursuit and practice of neighborhood economics?

In this special series of Place Matters, we have been exploring the relationship of congregations to their local context. We have made the case that, for churches, place should matter too. Any understanding of a thriving congregation is incomplete if it does not include caring well for our neighbors and neighborhood. We partnered with the Barna Group to put some data behind this.

For this conversation to have any credibility, of course, we must engage a more inclusive and representative audience of leaders. So, we have been talking to our friend, the Rev Dr. Alvin Sanders, President and CEO of World Impact, about some similar research he and his team have done with Barna to engage Black and brown pastors who are serving in lower-income, majority-minority neighborhoods.

World Impact is an organization that exists specifically to offer training and equipping for church leaders working in lower-income, urban communities. So what did Alvin and his team discover when they asked about the role of congregations in the neighborhood? Are there signs of hope here? And if so, what can majority culture churches learn to close the church-to-neighborhood gap?

Within the ecosystem of a city, what is the function of congregations? Are they just there to serve the needs of the members or should they play a role in contributing to the health and vitality of the city, or, at least, the neighborhood the church inhabits? The Leadership Foundation is a growing global network of faith-based leaders and organizations from over 40 member cities. Leadership Foundations believes that if we can change our cities, we can change the world. And this change starts with relationships. 

So how do they go about inviting their members from Dallas to Delhi into place-based impact? We are excited to have Lee Kricher from Pittsburgh, Oliver Rishmond from Chattanooga, and Dave Hillis from National speak about the work of churches in impacting their cities.

Listen in as one of our Lead Consultants, David Park, discusses the methods the Leadership Foundation is using to help churches engage in place-based work.

FCS is a grateful recipient of the Lilly Endowment Inc Thriving Congregations grant. Through our partnership with Lilly we have been launching 2-year, place-based cohorts that we call City Shapers. City Shapers is inviting churches to build and participate in multi-sector, collaborative tables that are working to bring about flourishing in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of their city. We are doing this because FCS believes that part of being a thriving church is being connected to your neighborhood and participating in efforts that aid its well-being. 

As a part of this grant, we have also been doing some research in partnership with The Barna Group, a Christian research organization that provides data and insights on trends affecting faith, culture, and ministry today. Surveying over 400 church leaders we have been looking at the connections between the traditional metrics of church health with community engagement, poverty relief, and justice. So, what do you think the surveys revealed? How much impact does neighborhood engagement have on our perception of the health of churches?

Guided by faith, driven to love neighbors, and committed to the role of the church, many of our team have struggled through the complications of leading churches into the world around them to participate in redemptive work. Every one of our stories emerges from different Christian traditions, different contexts, different membership sizes, and different budget constraints, but we have had many similar experiences when calling the church to love their neighbor and neighborhood.