We are a Catholic parish of 1086 families. We have a pre-k through grade 6 school, as well as a Christian daycare.
We are part of an area faith community with St. Boniface in Stewart, MN, a parish of about 100 families.
Our Mission
Our Parish Mission Statement: We are an open, growing community of Christians working to bring about God’s Kingdom. In communion with the Catholic Church, we put our faith into action as we invite all people to share in our spiritual journey, and to participate together in the Ministry of Word, Worship, and Service.
We are especially devoted to the positive development of youth and young adults, having a daycare/preschool program with approximately 180 children, a school with approximately 120 children, and religious education and youth ministry programs that reach out to several hundred youth and young adults.
We partner with another parish, St. Boniface, in Stewart, MN. They are a small parish, and we combine our communications so that they can also benefit. Thus, our weekly bulletin, quarterly newsletter, and website incorporate communications from St. Boniface, also.
Why We Need a New Website
Our current website is produced using a template from Frontpage 2003, and is updated weekly. While it is adequate for disseminating information, it lacks "wow" appeal, and doesn't provide much interaction opportunities. Our different programs would like to be creative in their pages, and provide interaction for people, especially the young people in our school, religious education, and youth ministry programs. Our facilities are also greatly used for community events--we offer free use of our facilities to other non-profits and charge a minimal fee for other uses, such as parties, etc. We'd like to have an interactive calendar that people can view and that our staff could all update with additions, changes, etc. We also do outreach within the community, and would like to better communicate these projects to the community, especially when we have drives or special youth events, etc.
How Our New Site Will Help Make the World Greener
We are trying very hard to reach people in ways that doesn't involve doing alot of mailings and using a lot of paper. We know that in today's world, people are less likely to look at print, and more likely to be online, especially youth and young adults. Besides saving paper, if we can reach people with an inviting and informative website, that would also save us time.
When the judges choose which non-profits will be selected to participate in this year's Challenge they will take into account testimonials from beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, board members and other
Reduction of paper consumption is important and combined with becoming a fertile, rapid, personal and compassionate means of communication moves to meet the particular needs of our faith community. Intergenerational communication and maintaining our close ties to parishioners who spend summers at the lake or winters in a warmer clime have become a reality. Elders who have limited ability to travel or must relocate for special care will not lose their sense of family with faith community.
Irene Matousek parish member
As we are digging out of the Christmas 2009 Snowstorm it is clear that the church did not have a means of updating the current website with information about the Christmas mass schedule. It would have been nice to have been able to check the website for up-to-date mass information and confirm if the storm did (or did not) cause any changes to the Christmas mass schedule.
Maureen Busche parishioner
As a youth minister, it is crucial to be able to have a means of communicating to youth, young adults and families. Reaching these various groups takes countless hours via traditional methods such as bulletins, newsletters, etc, and often times still fails. Practically everyone has access to the internet these days and can navigate it quite easily. By improving our website, we can create a form of communication that can keep up with the younger generation, be interactive, look appealing, and hopefully be easily accessible to the greater majority of our community. Hopefully, by having a professionaly done website that is created specifically for our needs, various program directors/staff could also be able to update their programs information, happenings, and news on their own. By accomplishing all of this, I believe our ability to communicate and continue our mission to spread the love of Christ will grow and reach more people in our community and surrounding communities. Currently, because of the poor website that we have, our youth ministry has a Facebook page which allows us to communicate to many youth, but there is still many downsides to that, as many of our youth do not have Facebook accounts, it is not as easy for some of the older generations to find/navigate, and it is extremely limiting as to what can be available on the page. Also, because of our poor website, only one person currently has the accesss and ability to update our site. It puts a lot of burden on that one person to make changes and updates for all different ministries. This process also makes it incovenient and slows down the time in which we as a ministry can get information onto the internet for everyone to access.
Kirk Hendrickson, Youth Minister
We are becoming more and more dependant on the Internet for our information - up to date information. St. Anastasia is a large parish, we could use an up to date, user friendly website. The web site is used for many things, by many groups - we need the info to be timely.
