When Jon Anderson was a pastor working on community outreach in Madison, he found a lot of overlap in how churches tried to work with nonprofits to help the city.
“What I started to see in those jobs was a lot of redundancy happening in the county, especially in church efforts,” he said. “And an ongoing need for resources of all kinds (with) direct service providers doing amazing work, but not seeing that the church was a part of the solution to reaching the community.”
Helping church leaders better collaborate, understand and serve Dane County is now at the heart of a new venture, Awaken Dane, led by Anderson and three other Christian groups: the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Upper House and University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.