PROVINCETOWN — Back-to-back fundraisers last Friday and Saturday boosted the effort to purchase a Pond Village chapel in North Truro so it can be leased back to its largely Jamaican congregation, according to campaign organizers Kate Wallace Rogers and Pastor David Brown.
Brown’s congregation has grown to more than 50 members in the last seven years, and after he was told in January that they had to vacate the chapel by April 1, an effort to buy the building took shape.
The Friday event at the Provincetown Commons drew close to 100 people and included food, singing, a raffle, and moving speeches. A table was packed with delicacies made by chapel congregants. Pastor Carlene Brown cooked up curried chicken, roti, and rum cake; Margaret Dwyer brought the sweet potato salad; and Dean Marriot made jerk pork. Lenora Gilette and Luciana Phipps whipped up fried chicken, rice and beans, and Jamaican escovich fish — a crispy pickled snapper. Drinks were donated by Perry’s Fine Wines & Liquors and the Provincetown Brewing Co. Raffle prizes included works by local artists and gift certificates donated by Ciro & Sal’s, Joe Coffee, and Land’s End Marine Supply.
As people took seats, speakers passed the microphone, rousing the crowd into a fundraising spirit.
Bob Keary and Harrison Fish, hosts of the morning show Wake Up! in Provincetown, kicked off the speeches and livestreamed the event on YouTube.
“Whatever little slice of the tapestry you inhabit in Provincetown, Truro, and the Outer Cape communities, you’ll understand the importance of communal space, having an opportunity to gather,” said Fish.
“If you are anyone who has ever enjoyed anything in Provincetown,” Keary added, “it’s because Jamaican people helped you have that good thing.” The crowd applauded.
“Tonight is a night when activism can take immediate effect,” said Aaron Clayton, a producer who helped organize the town’s Juneteenth celebrations. “Tonight, we are building long-lasting bridges between communities who are so deeply entwined but sometimes feel very far apart.” There was more applause.
Kate Wallace Rogers, a member of Provincetown’s Unitarian Universalist congregation and an organizer of the effort to buy the North Truro chapel, began her speech with a history of the chapel’s Portuguese Catholic roots. She also described the many jobs Pastor Brown has held in Provincetown, including at the Masthead Resort and Land’s End Marine Supply and as a driver for Pride Taxi.
“Here’s a man who has four jobs, and his most important work doesn’t even start until after all those four jobs are taken care of,” Wallace Rogers said.
“What I’m feeling in the room is what I would call the epitome of unconditional love,” Pastor Brown told the crowd. He traced the fundraising effort back to its origins at Wallace Rogers and her partner Myra Kooy’s dining room table.
“I didn’t know or imagine that I was so loved, that I have all these people behind me supporting me,” Brown said. Cheers erupted.
Fred Gaechter, chair of the Truro Conservation Trust, which has agreed to purchase the property and lease it to Brown’s congregation for $1 per year, said the effort has significance “for the whole community of Truro, Provincetown, and the Outer Cape.”
Gaechter said many people have asked him why the trust would be involved in the effort.
“It’s not a standard project just for land conservation,” he acknowledged. “But the fact is, if you don’t have community, if you don’t have people, why do you have the land?”
Kooy, an organizer of the fundraiser, donated a piece of her art — a multimedia assemblage she made more than 25 years ago that includes a painting of a chapel.
Kooy, who is Black, was adopted into a white Dutch family that drove to Paterson, N.J. to worship at a mostly Black church with a Jamaican pastor, she said. She made the artwork “remembering the joy I had in going to that church.”
Kooy told the audience that Provincetown allows her to be the fullest version of herself. “I’m as much Myra as I can be here,” she said. “I want to support and to fight for my community of people.”
On Saturday, a smaller crowd of about 25 gathered at the chapel to admire its architecture, explore its basement, and ask more questions. Evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian window as Pastor Carlene Brown, Wallace Rogers, Kooy, and a handful of Unitarian Universalist parishioners from Provincetown offered an animated rendition of the hymn “The Best Is Yet to Come.”
As of Tuesday, a campaign at GoFundMe.com had surpassed $51,000, with its goal now moved to $100,000.
The conservation trust had collected over $67,000 by Tuesday, Gaechter said.
Both amounts will be matched by an anonymous donor who initially pledged $500,000, meaning the total raised is now up to $736,000, or nearly halfway to the property’s likely $1.5 million listing price, according to previously reported messages from chapel owner Bob Valleau.
Gaechter said heftier checks have been arriving since Friday’s fundraising event, and he’s hoping for more.
Wallace Rogers is continuing to solicit donations from Provincetown businesses. “There are still people we need to hear from in terms of supporting the workers who have supported them for so long,” she told the Independent on Tuesday.
Cass Benson, proprietor of Provincetown’s Harbor Lounge, has said she will donate all proceeds from the first day of her season, April 4, to the fundraising effort. Ngina Lythcott donated her $2,000 Tim McCarthy Human Rights Champion award to the campaign. And at least one landlord has asked her tenant, who is Jamaican, to send half of his March rent to the GoFundMe campaign, Wallace Rogers said.
“We’re looking for a whale donor, minnows, and for all the mammals and fishes in between,” said Wallace Rogers.
