When Susan Francisco, a parishioner at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Jackson, checked the box next to Outreach Committee on a parish time and talents form, she did not expect it to lead to overseeing a program that would eventually distribute $1 million.
“It turns out I was the only one that signed up for outreach committee that year.”
Years later, Francisco chairs an outreach committee whose giving has reached a remarkable milestone: $1 million distributed through St. Luke’s community grantmaking. Behind that number are nonprofits, neighborhood programs, ministries and other organizations working with children, veterans, people experiencing addiction, families confronting loss and others throughout Jackson, Madison County and West Tennessee.
The story begins with Hal and Beth Meredith, longtime members of St. Luke’s who continued to support the church even after moving away.
The Merediths had made provisions for St. Luke’s in their estate planning. Francisco described the arrangement as a remainder trust, with Beth Meredith receiving income from the money during her lifetime. After her death, the funds came to St. Luke’s. The church then established guidelines governing how income generated by the endowment would be used.
One portion supports members of St. Luke’s pursuing higher education.
“Members of St. Luke who are pursuing college, master’s or even doctoral degrees could get a stipend,” Francisco said. “It’s not a huge amount, but it is something that would certainly help.”
The remainder goes toward outreach.
From one volunteer to a committee
Francisco came to St. Luke’s after a path that had already taken her across Tennessee. She attended St. Mary’s Cathedral in Memphis throughout her youth and attended Sewanee: The University of the South for college. Following medical training in Memphis, she eventually landed in Jackson, where she joined St. Luke’s in 1991.
Her medical career prepared her for the work of chairing St. Luke’s community grantmaking program.
“As a physician, you had to be on committees, and I ended up being on a critical care committee and chairing it for many, many years, mainly because no one else wanted to,” Francisco said. “I can run a meeting and run it quickly.”
So when St. Luke’s needed a group to oversee the outreach money provided by the Meredith endowment, Francisco helped assemble one in 2010.
“Several of the people who were part of the original group are still on the committee today.”
Today, including Francisco, the St. Luke’s outreach committee includes Ginny DeWitt, Harry Ecoff, Andrea Hazlehurst, Kathleen Huneycutt, Jonathan Kendrick, and Charles Overlay.
Once formed, the committee then faced a wonderfully simple question that became the foundation for a locally driven grantmaking process:
Who are some people we’d like to give money to?
Finding good work and helping it grow
The committee primarily supports qualifying charitable organizations serving people in Jackson and Madison County, although its reach may extend elsewhere in West Tennessee. Church members and committee members recommend organizations, including groups St. Luke’s has funded previously and organizations the committee is encountering for the first time.
When an organization is new to the committee, St. Luke’s takes the time to learn about it.
“We have someone from that group come and talk to us and tell us what they’re doing and all that stuff and what they’re trying to accomplish,” Francisco said. “And then, after we’ve done that, get together and discuss those different groups and then decide about giving them money.”
The approach is not simply to give money to every organization that comes along. Francisco said the committee has declined some requests when an organization did not have enough of a track record. The endowment’s purpose also establishes boundaries around what St. Luke’s can fund, with the focus on helping people.
Grant amounts vary with the money available and the organization’s needs and experience.
“If it’s something that’s brand new, we might not give as much, to see how they’re going to go,” Francisco explained. “Sometimes things, great ideas, they don’t quite gel or whatever. But usually if they’ve got proven track records, we’ve given between $2,000 and $5,000 per group.”
Those individual grants, multiplied across years and organizations, have now added up to $1 million.
A million dollars, many kinds of ministry.
Ask Francisco to name organizations St. Luke’s has helped, and one name quickly leads to another.
“There’s a lot of them we’ve done,” she said.
The list she recalled during the conversation reflects the diversity of need in the community. St. Luke’s has given to Keep My Hood Good, an after-school program; the library; Regional Interfaith Association; the Carl Perkins Center; programs addressing alcohol and drug addiction; Scarlet Rope, serving survivors of human trafficking; and programs supporting veterans. The church has supported a music ministry in which symphony musicians play classical music for people receiving chemotherapy. It has helped a hospital program serving families when a baby dies. It has supported a prison education initiative that allows incarcerated people to begin working toward a degree they can continue after leaving prison.
Of the prison program, Francisco was particularly struck by its potential to ripple from one generation into the next.
“It helps them to let their children know that it’s possible to succeed and get an education, get a better life,” she said.
St. Luke’s also supports a local café built around a pay-what-you-can model, where people unable to pay for a meal can instead contribute through work.
“It’s just about anything that is a nonprofit that is helping people with things like addiction, loss of a baby, whatever,” Francisco said.
Sharing beyond St. Luke’s
Eventually, the committee began asking what the Meredith family’s gift might make possible beyond St. Luke’s immediate surroundings.
After St. Luke’s hosted the 2025 diocesan Small Church Conference, Francisco proposed using some of the available money to empower smaller Episcopal congregations farther from Memphis and Shelby County. St. Luke’s began offering some of those churches $5,000 to put toward a charitable organization in their community or toward work that could strengthen their own congregation and ministry.
The idea recognizes something small churches often understand better than anyone: significant ministry can happen with limited resources, and sometimes an injection of funding can make something previously out of reach possible.
Francisco also hopes the grants help communities see their local Episcopal churches in new ways.
“If we can raise awareness of their church in their community, maybe that will get them more attendees too,” she said. “It’s kind of, this may not work, but at least we’ll try. But it’ll still be doing good regardless.”
For Susan Francisco, the grants are only one expression of the congregation’s commitment to its neighbors. Members of St. Luke’s give not only financially, but through their work, volunteer service and relationships throughout the community. “We’ve got a lot of involvement that’s not just strictly money,” Francisco said.
That understanding of generosity is deeply rooted in the Episcopal tradition of stewardship: what we have is not ours, but has been entrusted to our care.
Hal and Beth Meredith entrusted a gift to their parish. St. Luke’s received it and, over the years, has continued to give it away. Their generosity has become scholarships for students, meals for hungry neighbors, support for people seeking recovery, care for grieving families, educational opportunities and resources for organizations serving communities throughout West Tennessee. More recently, St. Luke’s has extended that circle of stewardship by placing resources in the hands of smaller Episcopal congregations and trusting them to discern how those gifts might best serve their own communities.
In that sense, the story of St. Luke’s $1 million milestone is about more than philanthropy. It is about vocation: a parish asking how the gifts entrusted to it might participate in God’s work beyond its own walls. A gift received becomes a gift offered, and that offering becomes ministry in places and lives the original givers could never have known.
The $1 million marks what St. Luke’s has given away. Its greater measure may be the abundance made possible when a church understands its gifts not simply as resources to possess, but as blessings entrusted to it for the sake of the world.
