Central Florida’s faithful bolster nonprofit outreach
Some days, the Rev. William Fulmore serves up sermons from the pulpit of the Church of Christ at Gotha. On others, he dishes out fried chicken from behind the dinner counter at Orlando Union Rescue Mission.
Either way, Fulmore said, the purpose is the same.
“I think that this is what [God] really wants ministry to be about. Because he went around helping folk,” said Fulmore, 64, who has been serving dinners at the Rescue Mission for more than five years.
Echoing a new Pew Research Center study that found religious people are more apt to volunteer and make charitable donations than others, the Rescue Mission and other Central Florida charities say the faith community provides critical support in providing food, shelter and clothing for the needy.
In survey results released last month, 45 percent of highly religious people — those who said they
pray daily and attend weekly services — reported they had volunteered in the past week. By comparison, only 28 percent of others indicated they’d volunteered over that time frame. Sixty-five percent of the highly religious individuals said they had donated money, time or goods to the poor in the past week, compared with 41 percent of people who were defined as being less religious.
In the Orlando area, religious adherents are integral to the nonprofit network, said Mark Brewer, president and chief executive officer of the Central Florida Foundation, a philanthropic organization.
“We couldn’t deliver a lot of human services without either faith-focused or faithbased organizations or initiatives at some of the major churches,” Brewer said.
For example, 528 of the Christianity-based Rescue Mission’s 1,200 active volunteers identify as being part of a church, spokeswoman Elizabeth Lynn said. That count likely misses a host of others who might not have come with their congregation but still consider service an outgrowth of their beliefs, she said.
Roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the region’s secular nonprofits are grounded in faith, including Habitat for Humanity of Greater Orlando. Catherine Steck McManus, Habitat president and CEO, said the organization serves people of all beliefs and doesn’t proselytize. However, the Christian faith “weaves its way through the organization in a very broad sense,” she said.
Churches, synagogues, mosques and other congregations represent another part of the Central Florida safety net, Brewer said.
The roughly 7,000 nonprofits classified as 501(c)(3) in Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties raise about $4.6 billion each year in charitable donations, he said. Congregations are likely responsible for harnessing an additional $1.5 billion, he estimated, extrapolating this number from the few churches and faith organizations that have publicly available tax reports.
These congregations also help direct people toward the right nonprofit resources, said Eric Geboff, executive director of the Jewish Family Services of Greater Orlando.
“All of our clients come to us as a result of a referral from somewhere,” said Geboff, whose organization runs a food pantry and offers counseling and emergency services. “More often than not, it’s through a synagogue or a church.”
At the same time, the impulse that drives many religious people to volunteer might have nothing to do with belief in God, said Joseph Richardson, who belongs to a local group of secularists, the Central Florida Freethought Community. Acts of kindness often flow from a humanist perspective that atheists and theists alike can embrace, he said.
“Having this compassion and empathy for fellow human beings and understanding that they hurt and need help sometimes … that’s the kind of motivation that we have for doing volunteer work,” Richardson said.
Richardson said he appreciates the work many religious groups do but worries they sometimes use volunteerism as a platform for spreading their beliefs. Imam Muhammad Musri, who leads the Islamic Society of Central Florida, said his organization eschews that approach to service.
The Muslim Social Services, a branch of the Islamic Society, supports the needy by providing help with rent and utilities in crisis situations, operating a food pantry and running a free health clinic, among other things.
“What we’re doing is an obligation that we have out of our own faith to serve people where they are, and it’s not appropriate, it’s not right, to inject religion into that setting,” he said.