The Faith and Safety Project of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America in conjunction with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops with a $75,000 matching grant in 2015 is providing a faith-based resource on the topic of technology safety, engaging the larger technology industry, and providing ongoing research and data on the topics and trends of digital citizenship for ministry use.

To date, the Project has launched the new Faith and Safety site and made the site compatible with mobile and tablet devices—a major requirement of Google and search engines.   The Project is regularly publishing industry news, information, and statistics from both partners and other research institutes.

As part of our ongoing grant commitment to engage the technology industry, participants attended the Faith Leaders’ Summit at Facebook’s Washington DC Headquarters, where Facebook was engaged on the topic of faith-based use of Social Media.

Project participants have also had discussions with the Religious Alliance Against Pornography (RAAP), which wishes to utilize the Faith and Safety site content, news, and select resources that have been produced for further syndication and distribution.  The Religious Alliance represents an interfaith coalition of 100 million in the United States.  An initial syndication partnership has been completed wherein relevant material from the Faith and Safety web site is now being syndicated to the RAAP Audience.

Researchers and content organizers have begun gathering information on critical research being conducted by such organizations as the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the Pew Research Center of Quinnipiac University, and Common Sense Media.

A robust editorial calendar will be developed so that traffic to faithandsafety.org and engagement in its Facebook page will grow. This editorial calendar will include an additional two to three items per week to the site, and an outreach to key influencers to promote the site.

A concerted effort will be made to place workshops at large religious education conferences for both Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, and a media relations campaign will target the placement of articles or interviews in external media.