Hello Friends,
I've been helping with my church's Capital Fund Campaign. We need to have this campaign in order to pay for building repairs. We've consulted with our diocese's fund raising professionals to follow best practices, with a lot of parish education and conversations about the church's financial needs, and with plenty of parish input and feedback on priorities.

I think the campaign is being thoughtfully and well run, and although it is not easy for me to ask people for money, I volunteered to be trained to be one of the actual fund raisers. We've been advised to reach out to every member of the church and meet in person to have conversations and make asking for money part of a conversation.

This I have done and in a few instances it has been a wonderful experience.

In other instances I have been greeted with outright rudeness and what feels almost like cruelty. In every one of the most painful experiences, it *hasn't* been people with limited incomes, but people who are fully employed professionals who appear to be actually angry about being asked for a financial commitment---I'm talking about regular attenders.

I find this so upsetting and disspiriting and I -- I hope I can say this here -- I am angry about being treated badly for doing something, or trying to do something that the parish as a whole has discerned as necessary and useful.

I wonder if other folks in this forum have had similar experience and words of insight. Thanks for any thoughts anyone might have to share.