GoodLands is mobilizing the Catholic Church to use her land for good. We provide the information and tools to help the Church use her property wisely to enhance all her existing ministries and missions — to care for creation, to end homelessness, to welcome the stranger, to deliver programs and services to the right places and at the right times, and to support her own fiscal sustainability.

As we care for the earth, thoughtful land-management strategies foster a clean environment, promote public health, address social justice concerns, add beauty to the world, support life in its many species, and allow us to glorify God through our care for Creation. The various institutions within the Catholic Church possess a large amount of land. If the Church adopts forward-looking land-use practices, it can put a huge dent globally in all the areas of environmental protection outlined in the encyclical Laudato Si’. Catholic communities across the world have an incredible opportunity to use their lands to lead not just by words, but also by witness. The mission of GoodLands is to help the Church develop a deeper geospatial understanding of itself and to leverage this knowledge to serve the Church’s mission to care for all creation. We are working towards a vision where Catholic conservation and sustainability can become the largest non-governmental global network of its kind, comparable to Catholic healthcare and Catholic education.

The idea behind GoodLands is simple: overlay Church jurisdictions and lands holdings on powerful GIS databases to locate where small changes in the management of land can have a big impact on sustainability and justice goals. Then connect these high impact sites with appropriate resources to make those changes. We believe that having the Church understand, care for, and maintain her land is so important that we are dedicated to helping the Church lay the foundation for mapping and land-use planning. GoodLands has already secured the partnership of the leading academic departments pioneering the use of GIS, and the leading technology company in the GIS space. GoodLands represents an implementation strategy for Laudato Si’ that can measurably contribute to creating a more verdant and just future for all humanity. The path to a brighter and more sustainable future can easily be found–what we need to locate it is a map!