Burhans got a pretty fortunate break when the founders of a mapping software company, Esri, offered to give her access to their most sophisticated software package for free to help her start her Catholic mapping project.
Still, at the beginning— in fact, for the first several years— Burhans wasn’t in a position to charge for her services. She did everything pro bono.
Burhans began cold-calling dioceses, offering to map all the properties they owned. Most dioceses she contacted— if they agreed at all— had their property records stored in a dusty box in a basement somewhere, so getting them all in order was a lot of work.
GoodLands’ work in this regard was groundbreaking— surprisingly so. Burhans quickly found that even seemingly simple online maps simply weren’t available, such as a map showing the precise boundaries of each diocese and the diocese’ name.
Burhans had sought out the advice of CARA, a Catholic research group based at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., to see if perhaps they had a digital map of all the U.S. dioceses. All they could offer her, she says, was a PDF that showed all the dioceses of the United States. Nothing interactive, and nothing global.
“There was no global map of anything except for this one on Wikipedia…it was made in Photoshop, pretty much, by a kid who was 16 and had pretty much painted it on. So that was the only global map of the church,” she said, adding that she later hired that “kid” as a paid intern.
By this point, Burhans had assembled a team of cartographers ready to create these maps that she sought. But still, she had her doubts. Surely the Vatican already had a mapping project like this, and maybe they had a good reason not to make the maps public. She didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, or worse, step on Pope Francis’ toes.
“I didn’t want to go ahead with this project first, if the Vatican had it internally; second, if the Vatican had it internally and had good reason that I might not know for not releasing it publicly,” she said.
Turns out, she says…the Vatican didn’t have it. Burhans would have to make the maps herself— and she did.
Why maps?
Today, several years on, along with a team of nearly 3,000 cartographers, Burhans and GoodLands have managed to map almost every single piece of Church-owned property in the United States.
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They haven’t made that particular map publicly available, but many of their other maps, containing a wealth of data, are available to view and download on the GoodLands website.
The beauty of mapping out everything the Church owns, Burhans says, is that it allows for better-informed decisions about what to do with the Church’s vast land holdings. It allows the Church’s leaders to better use what they have to further the Church’s mission, she says.
Many dioceses across the country are finding themselves with little choice but to sell off their buildings or land, as their coffers begin to run dry amid declining donations, church attendance, and increasingly, abuse lawsuits.
The data that GoodLands has collected is useful for much more than selling property, however. They’ve gathered a lot of information related to environmental concerns— properties at risk of flooding due to climate change, sea level rises, fire risk, etc.
There’s also a three-dimensional map of Boston with all the buildings and topography included throughout the diocese, mapped with NOAA-based data about sea level rise. They’ve also mapped properties most at risk for earthquakes in Los Angeles.
What’s next?
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