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A Publication of GoodCities © Copyright Glenn Barth

MultiplyVolunteers And Resources

A GUIDE to Multiplying Volunteers and Resources

By  Glenn  Barth  glenn@goodcities.net

On Ramps 3Our Theory of Change 3Under Promising and Over Performing 4One City’s Story: Modesto, CA 5My Journey 8A Practical Plan 10How To Get Started 12Three Steps Into Engagement And Impact 13Next Steps 18

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

On Ramps Our Theory of Change

Did you know that over 90% of Christians serving in leadership roles in their professions want to have a positive impact in their city, but are unsure how to get engaged effectively? GoodCities brings proven and necessary leadership tools that provide on-ramps for leaders to act with confidence to address key problem areas facing their local city or community. Through skill building and well-designed assessment tools, leaders can act with confidence to engage 10-15 times the number of current volunteers and resources that will solve problems and bring a deeper sense of God’s peace and greater prosperity to life in local cities and communities.

Our promise to the reader: In this short ebook you’ll learn about approaches that will build your confidence and generate 10-15X the number of committed volunteers and resources to advance the common good in your city.

In every city, an untapped leadership resource exists that once it is unleashed, will bring dramatic and lasting change. That resource is found in churches throughout every city; people of hope who act with confidence for the good of others in their city. When they act in concert with people of good will great things can happen.

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Under Promising and Over

Performing

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If  you  want  to  change  the  world,  it  starts  right  where  you  are.    Engage  people  of  faith  with  people  of  good  will  for  the  good  of  your  city.

GoodCities came to life because people of faith in cities were looking for experienced and thoughtful leaders who could serve as community coaches. We were invited to coach local servant leaders who wanted to see the Body of Christ work together for the spiritual and social transformation of their cities. Since 2007 we have served as leadership coaches for teams in fourteen cities in the U.S. We have worked with sixty

more cities through our conferences and consultations.

We use a number of approaches to develop and strengthen the leaders in any given city. Over the past five years, we worked with five cities using a tool that I will share in this ebook that can be used in any city to engage key leaders and their networks to address the root causes of the most pressing problems the city faces. We’ll go in depth with the story of one city to demonstrate the use and power of this approach.

One City’s Story: Modesto, CA

What would you do if you had 10-15X the current number of committed volunteers and resources to advance the common good in your city?The City Ministry Network in Modesto, CA used the GoodCities engagement process. They started with a core group of eight leaders. After engaging a GoodCities City Coach, they shared their story with over seventy leaders and their inner circle grew to eighteen. These eighteen engaged just over 100 other leaders in the private, public, and social sectors. Through cohorts gathered around critical issues, City Ministry Network built a spirit of collaboration that is solving difficult issues facing Modesto. What began with people of faith soon engaged people of good will. Today they have experienced a tipping point. Leaders have become more involved in community change processes and relationships between

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“I’ve been attracted to Glenn Barth’s contagious enthusiasm for his role as a connector and resource developer for church leaders in cities around the United States.”

- Ray Bakke

leaders have been strengthened. A number of positive outcomes came as a result.• The Jobs Cohort: a group of leaders dedicated to attracting businesses

to Modesto and preparing people to enter the workforce. They areworking with Learning Quest Stanislaus County Literacy Center to helppeople get their GED, a basic requirement for entering the job market. In2014, 111 people graduated with a GED. Of these, 29 enrolled in collegeand 18 got good jobs.

• The launching of Love Modesto: an ongoing collaboration thatengages people in service opportunities in the city and county. LoveModesto has held days of service in Modesto and 50 other cities overthe last five years. They have engaged 56,500 volunteers in over200,000 hours of service valued at over $5.2 million according toindependentsector.org. On April 18, over 4,000 volunteers engaged in90+ service projects as a part of the 2015 Love Modesto. It was coveredby CBS local television news.

• The launching of Recovery Modesto: a church-based small and largegroup approach dealing with every kind of addiction using the tools ofChrist centered recovery ministries. Outcomes in recovery are difficult tomeasure due to the personal, social, economic, and spiritual dimensionsof each person’s journey in life. What we can say is that the number ofpeople involved in just Celebrate Recovery ministries has grown from800/week in 13 meetings held in 10 churches in 2013 to 1250/week in21 meetings held in 15 churches at the end of 2014. The number of

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people Giving testimony to changed lives is growing as is the number of churches offering recovery ministries. Click here to see Scott Miller, the leader of Recovery Modesto tell about this important work in a short (2:48 minute) video.

• The launching of Catalyst Modesto: a monthly gathering of over 100leaders and influencers in Modesto who believe they can make thebiggest difference in their community by collaborating and workingtogether. Click here to view their youtube.com channel and see the kindsof things these leaders are working on.

• The launching of Pray Modesto: a prayer movement that currently engages70 churches each adopting a week to pray for Modesto and beyond.

• The strengthening of the City Ministry Network (CMN) as a multiculturalcenter for reconciliation and collaboration within the body of Christ thatengages people of good will for the good of the city. This leadership group isthe recognized champion of collaboration and a voice in the city for people offaith working with people of good will. As they grew in influence, CMN alsogrew their resources to the point of being able to hire a full time executivedirector.

Each of these groups has defined outcomes and came as a result of processes that many leaders trace back to their work with GoodCities. Modesto is not transformed, but there is a sense that God is present in a powerful way and is helping local leaders to find solutions to key issues that matter to the lives of people in this city.These leaders, unified by a vision for a good city, acted with confidence and have engaged 150X the volunteers and resources to address strategic issues in Modesto. That’s right, eight leaders began a process that leveraged the work of over 1,200 volunteers and provided value through them that would be counted in millions of dollars of impact if these services had to be paid services. It is a credit to the hard work, perseverance, creativity and personal sacrifice of leaders in Modesto.

What’s more, it can happen in your city or community as well. The mobilization tools we teach leaders to use are proven and work in any city or community.

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My Journey For over 30 years, I have had the privilege of working with leaders in cities and communities to help them effectively engage people in collaborative leadership that addresses not just the symptoms of pressing problems but the root causes. This has not been an easy journey. As a young pastor, I knew that outreach meant not only serving the people in my congregation, but also engaging them in service and witness in the world we live in. I quickly learned that very few hours were spent in the church and small groups when compared with the three areas of calling each person was living at home, work, and in community service.

Once my eyes were opened to this perspective, my work of equipping people to serve took on a very different perspective. Those I worked with were not just equipped to volunteer for the various roles within the church, but I worked to equip them for their primary callings at home, work, and service.As I helped my people in these areas, I was asked to lead in new ways as well. The County Department of Health and Human Services asked me to lead their Citizens’ Advisory Board and their Child Abuse and Neglect Advisory Board. Local business leaders asked a group of ministers who I met with for prayer, to solve a problem of unsupervised youth at the local mall on weekends. We pooled parts of our budgets to hired a youth worker to hold meetings each weekend to engage the youth.Over time, I served in leadership roles that allowed me to bring together churches to address issues of poverty, racism, homelessness, education, and jobs. The issues were compelling enough that over 200 churches shared from their budgets to hire an executive director and a social worker.

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Glenn BarthPresident of GoodCities

People of faith worked with people of good will to address these issues together for the good of their city.After serving a mega church in Minneapolis, I was invited to serve as the founding COO and leader of City/Community Ministries for Mission America, a coalition of 81 denominational presidents and over 350 ministry executives. My ten years of service with them gave me a keen sense of what was working in city movements to mobilize Christians to serve in roles that were having extraordinary impacts for good in cities. During these days, I began to do in-depth research on these movements as a part of my doctoral studies with Ray Bakke at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle. What I learned became the focus of my first book, The Good City: Transformed Lives Transforming Communities. When Eric Swanson, Sam Williams and I founded GoodCities in the spring of 2007, I brought all that had been learned through my experience and research with me. Our total focus since that time has been on helping leaders learn how to engage and mobilize Christians in leadership to bring transformational impact to the cities where they serve at home, work, and in service. To date, our coaching has helped 13 cities. Our City Convene Conferences have helped hundreds of leadership teams take their next steps in city transformation.

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Eric  Swanson,  Sam  Williams,  and  Glenn  Barth

A Practical Plan

(NO QUICK FIXES) There are no instant fixes for the problems we face in cities today. However, there are some keys to understanding how to engage hundreds, even thousands of people in solving problems being faced. While there are no quick fixes, there is one part that can happen quickly, the decision to start!

GoodCities tailors our work in leadership development and engagement to each city and community we work with. What I'm going to share is one process that we did in one city that we have now used successfully in several other cities.

We bring a number of different processes with us as local city leadership teams work with us. We'll consider the local situation and the issues being tackled, then we'll offer a pathway that we know from experience will address root causes and build a deeper sense of ownership within communities, utilizing assets from both urban and suburban contexts. This means that the day-to-day work and the success or failure of community engagement work will remain in the hands of local leaders, not with a GoodCities coach or consultant. So, as I share outcomes, these are deeply owned by those who are putting their sweat, imagination, and relational capital on the line each day in their city.

If you could make a $20,000.00 investment today that will pay back $20,000,000 in five years, would you do it? Most people would say, "That's a no brainer." However, some leaders stumble at this point. They have a hard time seeing into the future and what things are worthwhile to invest time and money in. What we do is not just affordable; considering the results five years down the line, it's a no brainer.

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This is not a quick or easy fix. It takes time. But why will it work?

Let's say you want to build a high rise building in your city. The quick part is making a decision to do it. From there it is a matter of time. First, you'll check the zoning regulations in the area. Next you'll analyze the business or residential demands. Then you'll take your concept to an architect. With plans in hand you'll go to the government offices to get the plans approved and to secure the necessary permits. You'll take time to put out bids and hire contractors.

All of this may take 2-3 years before the first shovel goes in the ground. From there, contractors will dig a huge hole in the ground for the next year to lay the foundation. From there, over the course of the next year, the building begins to appear and rise into the city skyline.

Why is this important? Because, if you want to build engagement around critical issues in your city, you will first need to lay a foundation that fosters trust, grows your knowledge through acquiring sound information, and builds relationships. Engagement will only happen when trusting relationships are joined with trusted information around issues that people care about.

GoodCities helps people initiate engagement processes. These are traditionally known as outputs. An output is an activity that produces outcomes. Outcomes are measurable results in critical areas that demonstrate progress toward the peace and prosperity of the city.

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The Shard in London

How To Get Started First, determine the geographic scope of the area to be impacted. Is it a city, a school district, a neighborhood? Some changes may be rooted in functional domains, but in this case we are focused on place and the people and institutions who are living and working there.

In Modesto, in 2009 a group of leaders were praying together about their city. The housing crash had hit their city especially hard and leaders at the City Ministry Network (CMN) were praying and asking God what could be done. Through a referral, the Executive Director and one of the board members came to us at GoodCities and asked for our help. What follows is the core of the engagement process that we worked with them to implement over the next eighteen months.

Their focus was the whole city and suburbs of Modesto. The leadership of CMN consisted of eight people. The first part of our work was to share a vision of what could be. Through a series of four presentations that I made to over 70 leaders in small groups, eighteen people committed to become interviewers in a discovery process. These were mostly business leaders who understood the importance of market research. These were followers of Jesus who cared about their city and wanted to see peace and prosperity arise from the ashes of economic and spiritual brokenness. When they were exposed to our process through these four identical one hour presentations, the leadership group more than doubled their volunteer involvement.

GoodCities brought a plan for building relationships and collecting information that would engage people in solving critical issues in Modesto. The real work would be done by these leaders. We provided guidance. In essence, the leaders in Modesto were the players and GoodCities offered the coaching.

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Three Steps Into Engagement And Impact

1. Build an Interview Process that Leads to Action

a. Recruit a team. Consider followers of Jesus who care about theircommunity and who are good listeners. Make a list of people who are outgoing and have significant networks. Invite a GoodCities Coach to have him or her share with you and a group of leaders from your city about the Discovery process by phone or with a video connection. In Modesto, I made four presentations to seventy leaders from whom came the 18 interviewers. All of these were done over a Skype video connection.

b. Who to interview. This will determine how far and how quickly yoursocial capital will grow. Build a list of Christian leaders in each of seven channels of influence. These include: Commerce, Government, Media, Religion, Family, Arts and Entertainment, and Education. You will be surprised how many Christians are already in key leadership roles in your city.

c. Construct a survey tool that will, at a minimum, include these sixquestions:

1) Tell me about your sense of God's calling on your life.

2) How is that being lived out at home, work, and in the placesyou serve?

3) On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being not at all and 10 being fullycommitted, what is your commitment to making a positivedifference in our city?

4) What are the three most pressing problems facing our cityand what would you do to solve them?

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5) If there are others who name some of the same issues youmentioned, would you be willing to work with them todetermine what is currently being done to address theseissues and to discover best practices?

6) Who else should we interview and would you be willing tomake an introduction?

d. Take your list of leaders to be interviewed and divide them amongyour team. In Modesto, since multiple members of the eighteen interviewers knew some of the same people among those being interviewed, I suggested that they hold a draft with the names of those available projected on a screen and the facilitator dressed in a referee's uniform with a whistle! In other words, have fun with this.

e. Set up Goals and a Timeline. If you need to interview 150 peopleand you have 15 on your interview team, ask them to complete all their interviews within 5 months, averaging two interviews each month. You can set the goal higher if you want, but I would not go lower. It's important that there be a sense of urgency in this process. Make sure to emphasize that the interviews should be done face to face, not by phone or email. It helps to have a leader of your interview team who can hold people accountable by following up with each interviewer within two weeks to make sure that the first appointments are being set up. To make this easier, have members of the committee interview one another as their first interview.

2. Provide a Written Report and a Report Back Session

a. Produce a Written Report.Take all the information gained from theinterviews and produce a written report. GoodCities has done this for several cities that we have worked with. It takes time to thoroughly analyze the answers from the interviews because these are mostly qualitative responses. The written report will help leaders understand the highest priority issues that people from every sector are willing to work on together.

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These six questions are just the start. To better understand how these six questions can be used and to get expert help with this process contact GoodCities directly by calling (952) 975-0516. We’re here to help!

This will tell you a great deal about what will motivate leaders and their networks to engage in solving these issues.

b. Schedule a Report Back Session.Once your leadership team receives the written report, set a time to share this report with all those who were interviewed and their friends. The goal of the report back session is engagement. We find that almost every person interviewed wants to make a positive difference in their community at a very high level and are looking for the right opportunity. The report back session provides an opportunity to form cohorts around each critical issue to discover what is currently being done in your city in each area and to discover best practice elsewhere.

3. The Interview Team now takes on anew role: Steering Committee

The Steering Committee will encourage the cohorts to interview each organization involved in addressing the critical issue their cohort has been assigned. The cohorts should interview the leaders of secular, government, and faith-based organizations to discover methodologies and effectiveness of each group. Each cohort should be invited to make a report to the Steering Committee that includes an assessment and recommended actions to be taken to better address the causes of the critical issue in your city.

With each report, new actions will be recommended that will engage more volunteers and resources in effective approaches that will reduce or eliminate the problem in your city. In Modesto, one of the critical issues that came out of the initial survey was the prevalence of alcohol and chemical

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Front Page of the Community Leadership Survey Report for Modesto

abuse. When Scott Miller, Associate Pastor of Big Valley Grace saw this, it was confirmation that a new approach was needed.

Scott started a movement among churches called Recovery Modesto (see above). Celebrate Recovery and other Christ centered recovery programs began to attract people who wanted to deal with their hurts, habits, and hangups through a faith-based approach. The results have been exciting as churches have begun to see healing that can only come through God’s grace and loving accountability. People seeking to deal with alcohol and drug abuse issues helped government leaders see the value of these programs because Celebrate Recovery really works!

The Jobs Cohort in Modesto has been meeting with leaders of poor communities to listen. Listening has become a first step rather than telling. What they learned was that many who live in poorer parts of Modesto lack a high school degree or GED. They also learned that employers are not interested in coming to their city or county unless enough potential members of the labor force have this basic level of education. Neighborhood leaders asked those in the cohort to help them get their GED degree.

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One of the members of the Jobs Cohort, Karen Williams, serves as the Executive Director of LearningQuest, Stanislaus Literacy Centers. Karen is working to help churches in the neighborhoods offer GED classes. Volunteers are helping as tutors. The numbers of people getting GED degrees is increasing (111 last year). The Jobs Cohort are working with people on a pathway that will lead toward good jobs.

Love Modesto offers regular service opportunities to thousands of people every six months or so. This movement has already spread to fifty cities, engaged 56,500 people in over 200,000 hours of service providing a value of $5.2 million to these cities and communities.

As you can see, these are not quick fixes, but they are processes that bring fruit over time.

In Modesto, the City Ministry Network (CMN) serves as the leadership team that gives birth to new and important partnerships, initiatives, and collaborations. Their Executive Director, Marvin Jacobo, is now full time. He is in touch with many of the actions that are taking place.

Part of their job is staying in touch with the many initiatives that CMN helped birth. Marvin is a champion for collaboration in Modesto and he offers guidance and leadership advice to those who are serving together to address critical issues that will lead to a transformed Modesto. Leaders like Marvin in cities across America evaluate, adjust, and redirect activities based on the results they are seeing. A healthy cycle is in place that is already producing fruit in critical areas of life in Modesto.

Leaders are people who see a need, put a plan in place, engage people to execute the plan, measure the outcomes, adjust the methods, and deliver results. You can be this kind of leader right where you are. God has placed you in your city for such a time as this.

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Marvin Jacobo Executive Director of CMN

Next Steps The Eyes of The Lord

“For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.” 2 Chronicles 16:9a

This is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. I have felt God’s strength as I have taken steps of faith at each juncture of this journey with Him and with other Christians in our city and in the cities I have coached and consulted with.

Has God placed you in your city for such a time as this? Are you ready for one of the most exciting and world-changing missions to begin right where you are?

Today is the day for you to take the next step. Call us at GoodCities (952) 975-0516. We'll help you take the next steps where you will see 10-15X thenumber of people involved and resources released to maketransformational impacts in your city!

What's at stake is the future of your city or community. Will your city be known as a place of peace and prosperity, where God's love and justice are tangible in neighborhoods, workplaces, homes, and schools?

Don't forget, God has placed you there for a reason. We can help you fulfill His plan with the many tools GoodCities has developed for such a time as this.

Glenn Barth April, 2015glenn@goodcities.net

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