Mission Appeals 2020
Raising Friends and Funds During a Pandemic
The faithful welcome summer mission appeals – when missionaries visit parishes across the country, share their stories, and gratefully accept a second collection to fund their missions, formation programs, and recruitment efforts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are raised through appeals. Essential funds for religious orders, diocesan missions, volunteer programs, and parish missions.
The Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 threatens to severely reduce, or eliminate mission appeals this year. Dioceses are struggling to decide what to do to preserve their mission cooperative programs because their mission offices rely on a percentage of these collections to fund their operations.
Through USCMA’s Accompaniment and Solidarity effort to keep missionaries connected with each other and engaged in the universal mission of Jesus Christ, we learned of several approaches to the mission appeal challenges for 2020. USCMA is creating its own response to this need.
Joliet Model
The Diocese of Joliet has accepted mission groups for its 2020 appeal program. They are listing the names of all the groups, where they serve, and a description of their work and ministries with pictures. This information will be shared with the parishes through email, social media, and the diocesan website with clear instructions on how they can contribute to the 2020 mission appeal. The participating groups need to provide a 500-word description of their work and ministries with pictures. All contributions will be pooled and distributed equally to the participating mission groups at the end of the year. For more information, contact Sr. Nancy Schramm, OSF – [email protected].
Milwaukee Model
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is offering a modified mission appeal program for 2020 with appeals later in the summer and from fewer groups. Each group that is accepted is asked to provide a written description of its program, what the funds will be used for, photographs of the mission and, if possible, a video. These materials will be sent to parishes via email and uploaded to a dedicated website created and maintained by the mission office. For more information, contact Dr. Antoinette Mensah – [email protected].
Pontifical Mission Society Model
The Pontifical Mission Societies USA is offering a program to dioceses to use Missio to honor mission appeals. Essentially, the missionary group would be invited to create a project in Missio and that project could be sent to all parishioners within a parish for the Sunday they would have given their appeal. To get more information, contact Fr. Andrew Small, OMI at [email protected].
USCMA
The purpose of the USCMA 2020 Digital Mission Appeal is to raise essential funds for missionaries during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic and its aftermath by complimenting diocesan efforts through a social media campaign. There are four major goals for this initiative:
Dr. Donald R. McCrabb
April 9, 2020
Members can download this document: Mission Appeals 2020 Report on Models