Building Foundation Grants

The Building Foundation Grants by Catholic Extension aim to support essential pastoral and administrative functions in under-resourced communities. These grants provide salary subsidies and operational funding to ordained, religious, and lay ministers, ensuring access to Catholic services. Prioritizing areas with significant financial need, this initiative seeks to sustain the church's presence where it is most critical, enabling continued ministry and outreach for those who may otherwise be underserved.

Goals
To help maintain and extend the church's basic pastoral presence and administrative functions in the most under-resourced communities, through salary support and small operations funding.
Summary
This funding initiative supports activities crucial to sustaining or expanding a Catholic presence in a diocese, ensuring that all Catholics have the opportunity to experience the faith. This type of funding is available only to support fundamental administrative and pastoral services through small operations funding and salary subsidies of ordained, religious, and lay ministers who extend the Catholic faith in their diocese’s most under-resourced areas. Financially stable parishes or ministries, even if located in an “Extension Diocese” are not appropriate recipients of this type of support. Funding in this category is provided to the communities with the greatest financial need, where the basic operation of fundamental services and institutions would be nonexistent or severely limited without external funding. Recipients of this form of funding are nonetheless asked to demonstrate the progress of their ministry and justify their ongoing financial need for such support on an annual basis.
Qualifying Funding Areas
Catholic Extension will consider funding the following basic operational and staffing needs:

• Salary subsidies for core pastoral leadership, including priests, women religious and lay leaders
• Salary subsidies for core diocesan or parish administration, such as business managers
• Essential operating costs, including heating expenses and minister travel
• Other basic resources for ministries or Catholic Church administrators in a diocese

Eligibility

Catholic Extension provides funding directly to designated Extension Dioceses that are approved by Catholic Extension’s Board of Governors.

Ineligibility

Funding is not available to individuals or organizations that do not work in these specified dioceses.