By Susan Gallagher

Diocese of Helena grants totaling $65,000 will be disbursed in the coming year to help parishes and other diocesan communities of faith reach out to youth and young adults. The money is available through an endowment established as part of the from Age to Age capital campaign.

Funding all of the 25-plus grant proposals submitted to the diocesan Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry would have required $128,000, said the office’s Doug Tooke. Proposals chosen for funding presented detailed, long-term, sustainable plans, said Tooke, diocesan youth and young adult minister. Grant recipients include Catholic ministries geared to students at the University of Montana in Missoula and Montana State University in Bozeman.

The new grant cycle marks the first full year of funding through the endowment program. About $32,500 was disbursed during the previous cycle that covered only part of a year.

Rita Pfau of St. Mary Parish in Stevensville said she knows what a difference a grant can make in a financially lean parish working to connect with young people. St. Mary got a grant last year.

Once a parish’s fixed expenses are covered, it’s hard to find enough money for youth work, said Pfau, St. Mary religious education coordinator. That’s where the grant came in. St. Mary used some of its grant dollars to advance youth-led Bible study, music and prayer involving both the parish and its Florence mission, St. Joseph.

Purchases included materials for the “Echoes of Faith” catechist program, and a set of Bibles so that young people all would be on the same page, literally, during Bible study. Students of the Bible now can walk through it together with greater ease than when they used Bibles that were acquired at various times and from various sources, and therefore did not “match.”

The four diocesan staff members who read the latest grant proposals and together decided which to fund are Tooke; John Fencik, director of Catholic Formation Services; Beth Yeakel, executive director of The Foundation for the Diocese of Helena; and Glenda Seipp, director of Stewardship Services and Annual Giving. Five-thousand dollars was the maximum that grant applicants could seek.

Yeakel said the grant program is one indicator that from Age to Age is having the impact hoped for when the capital campaign was being planned. “Hopefully, parishioners will be able to see, in a concrete way, the results of their gifts to the campaign,” she said.

Seipp said examples of from Age to Age gifts’ efficacy include Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry grants for instruction by the Center for Ministry Development, which is based in Gig Harbor, Wash., and held classes in Helena this summer. Those classes, designed to strengthen leadership in youth ministry and offered as part of a certification program, “help us build a firm foundation of faith that will bless us today and tomorrow,” Seipp said.


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 8, August 20, 2010.