NSGP funding pathway
A second set of eyes on safety for your congregation.
You have built a place where people gather with their guard down. Protecting that without turning it into a fortress is one of the hardest balances any organization carries — and most congregations do it on top of a dozen other responsibilities.
Concern is not a plan.
Almost no congregation fails to prepare because it doesn’t care. They fail because safety is enormous, nobody tells them where to start, and the block of time it seems to require never arrives.
So start smaller. Open the emergency plan you already have and check three things.
- Does it name people who currently work or volunteer here?
- Does it describe the building you currently occupy?
- Has anyone practiced any part of it in the last twelve months?
If all three are yes, you are in a small minority and you should be proud of it. If any one is no — that isn’t a failure. It’s the starting line, and now you know where it is.
Openness is theological. Our job is to protect it, not to end it.
If a recommendation makes your congregation feel like they are walking into an airport, it will not be adopted — and it shouldn’t be. Openness isn’t a constraint we work around; it’s a requirement we design to. Nearly everything we recommend is invisible from a pew. It is decisions, not hardware: who is watching the door, who calls it, and where people go.
We come alongside
Your safety team, your ushers, your facilities staff — they execute this, not us. We give them the standard, the document, and the backing to say no when they need to.
We sell no equipment
No cameras, no software, no systems, and no referral fees from anyone who sells them. If we say you need a camera at a particular door, we earn nothing from it.
We ask before we assume
Service rhythm, religious calendar surges, fellowship meals, weapons policy, language needs, and what your tradition requires — all of it shapes the plan before we write a word of it.
The money usually comes from somewhere other than your budget.
The FEMA Nonprofit Security Grant Program makes funding available to eligible 501(c)(3) organizations, including congregations, for target hardening, access control, lighting, alert systems, and training. Recent cycles have carried a cap of up to $200,000 per site, and organizations applying for the first time have received additional scoring priority.
The part most congregations miss. The application requires that funded capabilities be identified in a documented vulnerability assessment. The grant does not merely permit an assessment — it presupposes one. Free federal self-assessment tools are genuinely useful, but they do not produce a report with a credentialed professional’s name on it.
Which means the sequence usually runs: a modest assessment now, an application in the next cycle, and the significant work paid for by somebody else. We are glad to walk you through the timeline whether or not you ever engage us.
Grant terms, caps, and deadlines change every cycle and state deadlines run earlier than the federal one. Confirm current requirements with your State Administrative Agency before relying on any figure here.
Assess it, decide it, write it, train it, test it, and stay with it.
- Find out where you stand. A scored entry assessment. About an hour of your time and a ranked list of what would actually hurt you. Most of what we find in that hour costs nothing to fix.
- Document it defensibly. A comprehensive all-hazards risk and threat assessment with CPTED analysis — site-specific, scored, and built to stand up to a grant reviewer, an insurer, or an attorney.
- Decide it in advance. Emergency operations plans, lockdown and evacuation procedures, reunification, and a behavioral threat assessment process. Right now those decisions get made in the moment by whoever is closest.
- Train the people who will do it. Active threat response, Stop the Bleed and casualty care, de-escalation, and safety team foundations. A plan nobody has practiced is a document, not a capability.
- Test it under pressure. Tabletop and live exercises, facilitated, then debriefed — and you get the list of what broke.
- Stay current. Periodic reassessment, annual plan refresh, and quarterly threat and trend intelligence specific to your county.
What people ask us first
We already have a safety team. Are you trying to replace them?
No — they are the reason this works. What usually happens is that the safety lead has been carrying all of this in his head, on his own time, without a standard to point to and without anything in writing that backs him up when he has to say no to somebody. We give him the document and the authority. Most safety leads are the ones who wanted us there in the first place.
The sheriff already did our active shooter training. Isn’t that enough?
That is a solid program and we are certified to teach it ourselves. What it does is teach your people what to do as individuals, anywhere. What it cannot do — and is not designed to do — is tell them what to do in this building. It does not say who calls the lockdown, how the annex finds out, where the children end up, or how you reunify them with parents. That is the layer we build, and it sits on top of what you already have.
Will this alarm our congregation?
It shouldn’t, and if it would, we have designed it wrong. Almost everything we recommend is procedural rather than physical, and invisible to someone sitting in a service. The goal is that you can keep the doors wide open with confidence.
Do you sell cameras or security systems?
No. We sell no equipment, no software, and no systems, and we take no referral compensation from anyone who does. What we do sell is the work after the assessment — writing the plan, training your people, running the exercises, and staying on to keep it current. We will tell you plainly which of that you need from us and which you can handle yourselves.
Do you work with congregations outside Wichita?
Yes. We are on site across the Wichita metro and Kansas, and our co-founder covers the Phoenix, Arizona metro. Assessment and planning work requires a site visit; our quarterly threat and trend intelligence does not, and we provide that to organizations anywhere in the country.
Give us an hour. No cost, no proposal.
We will walk the building with you and tell you honestly what we see. If nothing we say is worth acting on, you have lost an hour. If something is, you will know exactly what it is and can decide what to do about it.