Congregations are in Crisis, Cities are in Need
Congregations are in crisis. Cities are in need. Graham Singh found a way to help both.
Many faith communities sit on properties in the heart of the urban core, but as attendance dwindles, they are struggling to financially maintain these sites.
Graham’s Relèven transforms faith properties for community impact, helping congregations build community hubs, housing, etc. by applying a new social business model that generates both societal and economic value.
Instead of abandoning the religious purpose of these properties , he sees it as a broadening to co-consecration.
“Isn’t it holy to help the homeless or welcome a refugee or celebrate the arts or foster community?”
We met at the Impact Summit America hosted by Phenix Capital Group. Graham, who is also a practicing minister, brought some of that vibrant energy to his impact debate on stage. When I heard him, I knew I needed him on the micro-podcast.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Graham. Please introduce yourself and your organization.
Graham: It’s great to be with you, Jacob. I’m Graham Singh, I am the Chief Executive and founder of the Trinity Centers Foundation in Montreal. We are working on the question of what are we gonna do with all of the empty church properties that are coming up as our religious landscape changes. And for us, that’s two primary outcomes. One is we fill those properties up with other charities and nonprofits and use them as community hubs. Or the alternative is that we see those sites demolished, turned into housing, much needed, and see a concentration of community activities around other religious properties.
So we’re really looking at optimizing religious property across North America.
Jacob: Give me some practical examples of that.
Graham: Yeah, our pilot site in downtown Montreal is called St. Jack’s, and it’s a 150-year-old church right in the heart of one of our big city [00:01:00] universities. And in that one site, we have over a hundred different groups that use that place throughout the year. So that’s a great example of what we would call a community hub. On the housing side, we have a church in Burnaby near Vancouver where they’re sitting on a couple of acres of property right next to some other opportune property, and we’re helping them connect with the municipality to create workforce housing and rebuild some premises that the community and the church can use there as well. So those are a couple of practical examples.
Jacob: How do you respond to the concern that you are just admitting defeat and giving up on congregations rebounding
Graham: Yeah, so religious communities on their own tend to hope that things haven’t changed as much as they really have changed. And so when they do this on their own they’re usually trying to say, if we just do the minimum amount that we can, then we can kind of keep things the way they used to be and everything will be fine.
We understand that that’s no longer possible and we’re really looking [00:02:00] at a more wholesale change and creating a real position of equity for some of the other nonprofits, the non-religious nonprofits that are there in the area. And so what’s possible with a little tuneup is usually not enough to fix a particular property.
When you completely rebuild the governance structure and think about that site, perhaps with its heritage building in mind, but also think about adapting that building quite seriously. We can usually push the envelope a bit further and most importantly, in terms of impact finance, we can begin to bring in other financing partners that we could never dream of under a religious heading.
Jacob: How do you navigate situations where you’re dealing with consecrated property with places that people have set apart as sacred?
Graham: We do talk about partial temporary deconsecration of a space. And I’m actually launching a paper on that in a couple of weeks at one of the Catholic educational institutions here in Canada.
And the idea is that we have a very high view in the Church of Consecrated space and especially in the Catholic [00:03:00] church. There we believe you have the whole church as consecrated space and that the rest of the world is something different. Protestants feel a little bit differently than that, and I think it’s worth challenging to think actually, what if we see the whole of creation as a consecrated space, all made by a creator. Whatever creation narrative we may subscribe to in our own faith beliefs, the idea of let’s play with that and say, okay, let’s imagine that we have a specific view of consecration.
Well, what if we were to say, let’s take part of the building or part of the property and say that, let’s imagine it’s deconsecrated that part of the property is deconsecrated? So we can allow in all of these artists, youth organizations, and refugee organizations. And maybe we’ll keep the altar area of the church consecrated in the classic way. Throughout all, all of that period.
What I love to speak about is actually the idea of co-consecration, because once you start doing that and you think, hold on, is it not a sacred activity to welcome a refugee? is it not a sacred activity for somebody to work their entire life as an artist and [00:04:00] now perform that in front of their friends? And in fact, do they not see that space as. Consecrated space as well. And what if we even talked about co-consecrating space and believing and valuing each other? You could see this as a part of the journey for diversity, equity, and inclusion and all the way into the architectural and conceptual understanding of space.
So yes, we have objections, but yes, we do a lot of deep thinking around this. Usually what happens is a congregation realizes, actually, those are the same groups that as it has become a bit more old-fashioned and sometimes a bit more set in its ways, those are often some of the groups that they’ve excluded and that they’ll say, I wish we knew how to talk to the artists.
And part of our answer is to share your space, not with them as the little tenants, but with them as serious partners in your community. So yeah, space use is a very important part of our thinking.
Jacob: So how did you get into all this? Tell me about your unique journey to get here.
Graham: Yeah, so I originally traveled from Canada where I was born and grew up to [00:05:00] the UK for grad school. And I had the privilege of studying international relations at the London School of Economics and was able to study what was happening in my father’s family from Guyana where our family had come over as migrants from India over 150 years ago.
And through that study, I realized I really cared about the world, I had no idea where I was gonna go. And I started working in an advertising agency, which I both loved, but also found myself wondering how are we going to make the world a better place. And that ended up leading me to find the church again.
It’s something I had grown up with but perhaps had off on the side of my identity. And I began to explore my Christian faith as something much more primary for me. And that ended up leading to me retraining and in fact being ordained as a pastor in the Church of England.
And we were part of setting up a team called the Closed Churches team, which was looking at some of these issues and taking it very seriously. And so that [00:06:00] experience of journeying into leadership in the church and then realizing how much these churches, if they were reopened with a new community benefit in mind, how much good could be done.
I do still lead, in fact, one of the largest Anglican churches east of Toronto. We’re a thriving Anglican church with lots of young people, mostly led by university students these days. And my model of church leadership has always been to build teams and let them lead. And so my time with the church is relatively restricted compared to the time that I lead with the foundation.
And of course, what I’m doing with the foundation I see as part of my calling as a pastor. Because I realize so many churches are overwhelmed by these properties and they’re not able to accomplish what they would like to as communities of faith because they’re overwhelmed with questions that are beyond them and are really requiring much deeper conversations about urbanism, about impact finance and the restructuring of our cities, towns, and villages.
Our vision is that where there is a religious property in the heart of where the city is growing, we would [00:07:00] work with actors who are forming the shape of the city to make sure that that property can best serve the needs of the city. And so that doesn’t necessarily have to be a community hub or housing. It could be that we hand that property over to the municipality, and they turn it into a library. So our vision is that the properties serve the communities they live in, and that could take many different forms.
And I’m not gonna try to treat all faith backgrounds in the same breath Jacob, but certainly within the church, we have to look back to Jesus and say, did Jesus count on having a large property empire? Did he have any political power at all? And we realized immediately we knew the answer to these things. Jesus had absolutely no property we’re told in the Bible, he didn’t even have a place to lay down his head. So Jesus and wealth and land are something that one has to face as a Christian. By restructuring property, I think we’re gonna see better quality faith communities. They are more free to do exactly what they’re called to be. They’ll be more relevant, less problematic, and in fact, I’m [00:08:00] very, very excited for the future of faith.
Jacob: You’ve mentioned Christian congregations. Do you work with other faith communities as well?
Graham: So it’s not outside of our purview and we have actually a new synagogue working group starting next month. And the story with synagogues is very different. Many of the properties of the oldest synagogues are in private family houses, they’re very old. They go back in many North American communities, but they’re not on the high street the way the Christian churches were.
Some of the newer synagogues and the larger synagogues, of course, are facing some of these challenges. The older city center properties are absolutely Christian, and that’s why we have one pattern there. But what we would love to see is that a community hub can host multiple faith communities of multiple backgrounds without watering down any of them.
So one of our pilot sites in Edmonton, we actually have three Muslim communities that meet there every Friday and a couple of churches that meet there on Sunday. And I would argue that both the Muslim [00:09:00] communities and the Christian communities are in fact stronger because of the way that they share that property.
We’re working right now on making the argument with the government and we’re starting with the federal government of Canada in understanding that the occupancy cost of charities and nonprofits will be very dramatically impacted if we lose more of our religious properties.
Lemme put this into context. Imagine a scout group, an AA group, a youth employment club, a refugee support center, or a homeless shelter, imagine in your mind where those places are. Of course an AA group, you could look at any film where they show an AA group meeting, and I guarantee you it will be in a church basement with a styrofoam cup. We need the AA group. 12-step groups are the most unbelievably efficient and effective at dealing with addiction. Very low cost interventions, very high quality results and they all meet in church basements.
Everybody knows that. So if we could help the government understand, and, we’re having major inroads with this in Canada, [00:10:00] and I’m excited to say we’re beginning to see our work roll out further in the US as well. If the government can understand this we can create two instruments to help our work.
One is retaining existing tax exemptions. These are local tax exemptions. Churches have those exemptions generally, and they pass on that through cost savings to the nonprofit tenants who rely on them.
The other is de-risking impact finance structures. And if I told you that I was part of one of five charities that were gonna get together and buy an empty church. And then to a Financial organization, a group of charities, impact finance people, please could you lend us $5 million against this $5 million property so we can fix it up and rent it out for all these community activities?
Who’d like to take that loan? Ah! Even very well-organized CDFIs, community development finance institutions in the US, and similar organizations in Canada struggle to do that kind of lending. And the [00:11:00] reason is nobody wants to call security on a loan of that kind for exactly the great stories we just told. Right? Here’s this community hub, all kinds of things happening. Sorry, they can’t meet their mortgage we’re gonna have to sell it on the open market. The reputational risk of calling in a loan like that is one of our great challenges on the impact finance structure. And so if we could wave a magic wand frankly, I’d have a federal government of Canada guarantee Jacob and then I’d start rolling that out across the US as well, to make sure that that part of the story had some kind of coverage. And there are some very wonderful foundations, particularly in the US who’ve done, you know, they’ve really worked miracles with loan guarantees of that kind. So that’s, that’s the magic wand I would wave.
Jacob: What’s the biggest hurdle you face right now?
Graham: We’re in the process of launching a smaller fund. It’s a bigger fund for us, it’ll be $30 to $50 million Canadian dollars, and we’re about halfway committed to that fund being launched. Now, we need to finish it up and get it closed and get it running and one of the [00:12:00] things we’ve struggled with is that in the impact finance space, there’s a lot of big talk, big challenges that get solved. But then you also need to follow through with smaller funds, which prove that the exact way through that work can happen. So we’re in the process of focusing on getting that fund opened and then closed and running. We need not only investors, we need to make sure we have the right investors, our federal government of Canada is one of the investors there, and a number of leading foundations.
Foundations really are our best investors. They are the most visionary, the most exciting, they’re willing to connect dots, and the best foundations are the ones who are trying to lay the groundwork in my view, for other types of institutional investors, like the pension fund, a bank, an insurance fund, and then all the way down into a private family office. If we can get that going, that’s one thing we need.
If there’s another thing we need, it’s really to help people engage those who are [00:13:00] on the religious side of the equation to understand that their only future is in Recrafting with their local community.
Jacob: If the impact community wanted to learn more, what’s the best place for them to find you online?
Graham: So we have everything of our best thinking up on our website, trinitycenters.org. You can see all of our media coverage, you can see some descriptions of the next fund we’re launching, you can see case studies of our work, and you can get in touch. trinitycenters.org.
Jacob, thank you so much.
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