Founded in 1840 on the corner of SLU’s campus, St. Francis Xavier Church was the first English-speaking parish in St. Louis City. The church has always had very active social ministries, ranging from providing IDs and birth certificates so that people can secure jobs and/or benefits, racial reconciliation, activities to address the environment, and more.
The birth certificate and ID ministry, run almost entirely by volunteers, began in 1993 by helping St. Louis area residents obtain birth certificates and Missouri state ID cards. The ministry is an impressive example of how a church can identify a simple, yet very real gap in the fabric of social services and meet that gap with excellence. For many individuals experiencing homelessness or coming out of prison, securing an ID card or birth certificate is one of the very first barriers they face before being able to take steps towards independence and self-sustainability. Such documents are critical in obtaining employment, education, benefits, and more. The ministry pays for the cost of obtaining these ID’s/birth certificates and helps clients navigate the complicated process.
Partnership #1 (2016)
In the past, the ministry was primarily supported by parishioners, supplemented by occasional grants. In order to ensure the growth and sustainability of the program, College Church needed to secure funding beyond its parishioners. The Brown Sisters Foundation issued a challenge grant to help attract new donors to the program through an organized campaign leveraging volunteers, existing relationships, and visits to other churches.
Partnership #2 (2018)
The ministry approached Brown Sisters Foundation with a request to help modernize its data collection tools from mostly paper to an online database. This would allow the ministry to respond to increased demand for services and accommodate a larger number of guests. It would also increase leadership’s understanding and ability to communicate its impact. Moving to a cloud-based data collection system would also allow the agency to achieve a long-term goal of launching mobile services, thereby better reaching and serving clients. The Foundation awarded a challenge grant to help the agency attract new and existing donors to support these capacity-building and program expansion efforts.
Partnership #3 (2020)
The ministry observed that vulnerable populations have an increased need for state ID and birth certificate services, beyond what the program could provide through its current service model and location. After piloting a mobile outreach approach and incorporating qualitative data collected by Washington University graduate students, St. Francis’ Social Ministry is expanding its Mobile Outreach Project to create a plan for increased, decentralized access to State IDs and birth certificates in the St. Louis region for people experiencing poverty and homelessness by training partner organizations to serve clients from their agency locations, and by accompanying street outreach workers to provide direct services to people who are homeless and explore the potential of a “mobile outreach van” to bring services to people where they are. The Brown Sisters Foundation awarded a challenge grant to hire a part-time staff person to lead these program expansion efforts.