Starting Off

Welcome to the newly inaugurated NEPCI website! Here you can follow the work of the New England Presbyterian Campus Initiative in the final stages of the project and learn about events coming up in your area. But before you learn about all the ways you can get involved with NEPCI, you may first have a few questions. Let me try to answer a couple of them...

What is the New England Presbyterian Campus Initiative?
NEPCI is a joint partnership between the Presbyteries of Northern New England, Southern New England, and Boston that seeks to discover the current state of collegiate ministries in New England and develop a mission and strategies for the presbyteries to pursue in order to strengthen Presbyterian outreach on campus. Since June 2008, NEPCI has collected information on the region’s 215 colleges and universities, spoken with nearly 40 stakeholders in collegiate ministry (including currently serving campus ministers, congregational ministers, governing body officials, and college faculty and staff), and conducted four focus groups with students from a variety of campus ministry backgrounds. The project is a year-long initiative, from June 2008 to May 2009.

How did NEPCI get started? How is it funded?

NEPCI emerged from a tri-presbytery collegiate ministry summit, organized by members of the Presbytery of Southern New England, that took place in Amherst, MA in November 2007. That summit reached two major conclusions: the presbyteries needed a better understanding of the state of campus ministries in the region as a whole in order to develop effective strategies for outreach, and a follow-up summit was needed to continue the momentum of the initial conference. A group of conference participants from the Presbytery of Boston later applied for a grant from the New England Presbytery Partnership Group to fund a position that would achieve these purposes. This grant, received from the Presbytery Partnership Group in the spring of 2008, secured a year of funding for the project to do a campus ministries needs assessment and then report back to the Presbytery Partnership Group with a mission and strategies for outreach in the three presbyteries.

Now, of course all this exciting information (ha!) has made you wonder what we've learned and how you can get involved. The goal of this website is to answer both of those questions. Keep checking here to find out what the project is doing, where you can meet Kelsey, and how you can get involved further. And please feel free to share with us your questions and comments about NEPCI here! We look forward to hearing from you!