Welcome to the Clergy and Churches United collaborative website! We are a faith-based, social service collaborative, located in the historic Hill District of Pittsburgh. Our member programs offer a variety of services to answer the needs of people of all ages, while our member churches provide spiritual grounding to the people of the Hill and beyond. Our collective programming is also available to meet the needs of the Hill District community.
I hope you enjoy your visit to our website. It contains information about our collaborative and the services provided by all of our member programs and member churches. Please join us as we create a better day in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
The Clergy and Churches United Administrative and Development Office
Clergy and Churches United was formed to be an administrative development office, with a focus on nonprofit management, to seven member programs (all nonprofit social service programs) that had their start as church outreach programs. The seven founding clergymen had dialogued about the most critical needs in both their churches and outreach programs. They came to understand their common needs, which were basically two fold; a) aging congregational populations suffering from a lack of affordable health care to meet their growing needs; b) the difficulty of obtaining adequate, diverse funding for their individual outreach social programs that were rapidly expanding in scope and client participation, due to the demand for their services in the Hill District. The clergymen, themselves, had neither the time nor the development knowledge to remedy either social ill or need; however, they knew some of the merits that a development office might bring to their individual nonprofit organizations. Their greatest obstacle was the cost to set up a development office with their already expended budgets, not to mention the set-up cost of seven.
They quickly decided to engage in their first collaborative project together by seeking funds to support an administrative development office that could serve all seven programs. After eighteen months, funding was obtained to form and develop a collaborative administrative development office that would begin the process of supporting and training seven program directors in nonprofit management. The topics covered would include: program marketing and public relations (assistance); board development; strategic planning (long and short term); program development (needs assessment, performance, sustainability, outcome evaluations); grant writing (techniques, writing and assistance); 501 (c)(3) tax exemption application (assistance); and special event planning. These direct services would be beneficial to all the member programs and allow the program directors to focus on the daily social service operations of their programs, while having a training and development strategies arm to rely upon daily at the cost of one development office. Eventually, each program would duplicate the development model of the administrative office in board development, and then rely on the office for grantwriting assistance, newsletter publication, special event assistance, outcomes training and board of directors development assistance when needed within their various nonprofits. The clergymen (now the Executive Board of the CCU collaborative) hired a very skilled nonprofit management executive to create the development plan. Together, the collaborative has now successfully completed a very strategic and skillful marketing and public relations plan throughout the collaborative. Under the direction of the CCU Administrative and Development office, all of the member programs are about to embark on extensive Board Development and/or other nonprofit management practices to meet the demands of their new capacity growth due to their excellent marketing strategies.
