Project Overview
Sinsinawa Mound has been the motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa since 1847. As the congregation’s numbers declined, the Sisters faced a decision about more than 300,000 square feet of chapel, residential, dining, and event space which is no longer fully utilized. NTH served as strategic advisor, leading a multi-year process to test whether portions of the campus could be transferred to and redeveloped by a partner aligned with the Sisters’ mission and land ethic. The work gave SDI leadership a clear, fully vetted basis for one of the most consequential decisions in the congregation’s history.
The Challenge
This was never a conventional assignment. The Mound is sacred ground to the congregation and carries more than 175 years of history, so any transaction had to honor SDI’s guiding principles – including constraints on future uses and, with them, marketability. The buildings in question were physically entangled with the buildings the Sisters were keeping: shared tunnels, a private waste-water treatment plant, two deep wells, a central boiler house, and a chapel the Sisters intended to keep using. Rural southwest Wisconsin offered a thin pool of qualified buyers for a property of this size and specificity. And the decision did not rest with a single owner; it required consensus across a congregation, guided by a leadership council that turned over midway through the process.
How We Made It Happen
NTH built the process from the ground up. We toured and documented the campus in detail – buildings, easements, utilities, shared infrastructure, and operating obligations – so interested parties could evaluate a genuinely complex property without guesswork. We worked with SDI to frame the questions the congregation needed answered: sale versus ground lease, which buildings could be physically and legally separated, and how the chapel, parking, campus management, and the waste-water plant would function under shared ownership, and more. We then ran a disciplined evaluation of successive development partners – setting milestones, structuring and comparing proposals, coordinating presentations to the council, and pressure-testing feasibility alongside SDI’s legal counsel. Throughout, we translated a technical real estate process into plain terms for the council and the wider congregation, so every decision was made with full information rather than under time pressure.
The Outcome
After a thorough exploration of sale, ground lease, and redevelopment scenarios with multiple interested parties, SDI’s leadership brought the search for a new owner to a close and moved forward with a different plan for the underutilized buildings. The Sisters reached that decision with a complete picture of the property, the market, and the economics behind it. Sinsinawa Mound remains the motherhouse of the congregation.
