Churches United invites community to respond to survey to establish the nonprofits future

MOORHEAD, Minn. (KVRR) — For the last 38 years, Churches United has provided shelter, housing, and food every single day. But the need continues to grow.

“Every time that we calibrate and try to increase our services to meet the need, the need continues to grow too. And so across the community, across the Fargo-Moorhead area, we’re a big city now. We’re not the little dot on the map that we used to be, so we have to respond to that,” said Pastor Devlyn Brooks, Churches United.

Over the past six months, Churches United’s board and leadership team identified their need for revenue. The non-profit provides services for more than 500 people per day, spending approximately $3.2 million per year. But 70 percent of the funding each month has been from raising funds from the community, which Brooks says is not sufficient.

“It takes money to fund an operation like ours, and we just become a lot more vocal about it because we can’t apologize. It takes three plus million dollars a year to run our organization, and we need the community’s help to fund that,” said Brooks.

To address this, Churches United has recently published a survey asking community members, supporters, and donors to express what they believe the nonprofit needs to do moving forward.

“We want to identify something that is not getting done, so that it offers the community a solution, but it’s also income-generating for us. If we can do that and we can find a business that nets a profit for us, then we can reduce the asks of our donors. We don’t have to ask donors to fund that seventy percent every month,” said Brooks.

Brooks hopes to use the survey results to present at a forum with local leaders in July.

For more information on the survey, you can find it here.