This is my eighteenth Annual Report and it marks my last as rector. I am especially proud of the local and global relationships that the Trinity Grants Program has fostered in my years at the Parish of Trinity Church.
Our African partners tell us stories about harambee, a Kenyan practice in which villages and tribes sit together to consider individual and common needs. Begun in the years before Kenyan independence in order to create a nation from scarce resources, the harambee might help a family to buy a refrigerator or s t ove, or a town to build a school or a health clinic. Once the project was complete, the recipients would step back from the circle in order to allow others to participate as well. harambee's crucial aspect is neighbors acting in relationship: everyone contributes and everyone benefits.
This year’s Annual Report for the Trinity Grants Program focuses on our grantmaking in Metropolitan New York. We recently completed a comprehensive review of the past eighteen years of Metropolitan New York grants, totaling more than $14 million in funding. “Relationship” was a theme that ran throughout our assessment. Our long association with many grantees allowed frank and helpful conversations about future strategies and next steps. The result is a new focus on “social transformation,” targeting change in the economic, political, and social systems that affect people’s live s and communities in metropolitan New York .
Social transformation may call up images of marching against apartheid or rebuilding the South B ronx but it begins with the concrete relationships that harambee demonstrates: a sense of shared opportunity and responsibility that leads to a deep understanding of a community’s challenges and possibilities for ch a n ge. Metropolitan New York is now confronting its most major social and economic tests since the Great Depression, and these connections are crucial for any sustainable progress. Deep relationships also characterize our other program objectives in telecommunications, the Global South, and spiritual formation. Our neighbors in these areas are further afield but our bonds with them are no less strong. At a time when our ties as an Anglican Communion and an Episcopal Church in the United States are strained, the Trinity Grants Program’s global relationships send an important message: the connections of our faith are larger than any one issue or disagreement. It is in communion that difficult issues become solvable. This understanding ties together all of our funding objectives. We believe it benefits the global Church as well.
Meaningful and lasting relationships across eve ry kind of boundary—social, economic, national—are profoundly countercultural in America’s fast food, “everything’s disposable” society. As we are reminded by the practice of harambee, lasting change is only possible when we work with our neighbors, inside or outside the Church. I will wa t ch with interest as these associations continue to strengthen our Church and its work in the world in the years to come.
Faithfully,
The Reverend Daniel Paul Matthews, D.D. - XVI Rector