Partners for Sacred Places

For this month’s ‘Odd Socs’, we cross the Atlantic to look at the work of Partners for Sacred Places (PSP), an organisation dedicated to finding creative ways to maintain America’s historic places of worship as civic spaces. These buildings face the same pressures as their equivalents in the UK: costing more to maintain than they receive in income, with an ever-diminishing pool of people shouldering the hard work of keeping the buildings in community use. In the USA, a further challenge is the lack of listed status for many historic places of worship; some congregations oppose designation for fear of limiting their future options. Often that means the redevelopment of a valuable c