Measuring Readiness: What You Should Know Before Starting a Property Project
If you answer yes to any of the following three questions, then it’s very likely you are ready for a placemaking project:
Do you want to use your church for more community impact?
Do you desire to exhibit a welcoming presence in the neighborhood?
Do you hope to practice hospitality with the neighbors around your church?
Placemaking is a fancy word for turning empty spaces into vibrant places to be for community connection. Imagine community gardens, dog parks, street festivals - the neighborhood social watering holes that we all love. Placemaking is a way for your church property to become a place that gathers neighbors and ministers to the community.
This might feel like an exciting, but TALL task. Understood. And, you probably have several questions that immediately come to mind:
How would I explain the value of placemaking to our congregation?
Do we have enough volunteers for this kind of project?
How much does this type of thing cost and can we afford it?
What if these ideas don’t work?
These are important questions that you should be asking, but you don’t let them overwhelm or paralyze you. Instead, you can use our five pillars of readiness to determine what your church might be ready for. Those five pillars are: Moxie, Motivation, Capacity, Money, and Community Connections. If you strengthen yourself in these areas, you will be ready to transform your church property in creative ways that fit your church’s context and capacity.
1. Moxie
In order to find the right project, you may need to try several small, low-cost ideas before you find one that really fits. This will take time, perseverance and a “can-do” attitude of willingness, creativity and adaptability on the part of everyone involved. In other words, this will take Moxie. To be high in Moxie is to possess a “can-do attitude” that translates into proactive problem solving even with limited resources, a willingness to persist despite obstacles and an ability to test various ideas, adapt to new information and embrace collaborative opportunities.
2. Motivation
No successful property or placemaking project happens with just one person. Any church that wants to use their property to bless the neighborhood will need to build a coalition of church leaders, congregants and community members to make it a success. This means you’re going to need to inspire buy-in from several parties by showing how placemaking aligns with your church’s vision and mission.
3. Capacity
Moxie and Motivation are not enough to carry a placemaking project through to the finish line. You also need to know your capacity as a church.
What is your timeline for taking on a project?
How fast can you realistically get the pieces in place to move forward?
In terms of volunteers, who do you have on your team and what is their bandwidth?
Do you already have designated volunteers or would you need to recruit some?
These are the kinds of practical questions you must ask so that you choose a project that not only aligns with your church's mission, identity and vision but that’s also sustainable.
4. Money
Yes, you will need money to do a placemaking project, but when talking about money in the context of readiness, we’re not talking so much about the nitty-gritty of budgeting for a project. Rather, we see this thinking about money as an invitation to think more deeply about how your church approaches questions of investment. What is your church like when it comes to spending money on new ideas? Which values and missional goals shape what your church spends money on and how might placemaking fit into them? What does your church’s budgeting process reveal about what are considered worthwhile investments?
5. Community Connections
The entire point of placemaking is to establish, nurture and improve relationships between your church and the local community. But meaningful relationships with the community are not just the end, they’re also part of how you get there. You need community connections to be successful for three reasons:
Through community connections, you can discover what kind of project would actually bless the neighborhood.
Getting to know the community can help you discover potential partners, advocates and helpers as well as opportunities to collaborate.
Building relationships can translate into help with the implementation and long-term upkeep of your placemaking project as it becomes a community asset.
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Taken together, these five pillars constitute a framework you can use to get a sense of how ready your church is for placemaking. If you want a partner to walk with you in that process, check out our Readiness Workshop. This includes a live coaching session during which we help your church group evaluate your readiness in all five areas and identify practical next steps you can take to get ready to launch your first project.